This mom gave her son an 18-point contract with his iPhone

I want to admit up front that I am not a parent, nor am I a teenager -- I'm just a twenty-something caught between the two age groups.

When I wanted something when I was young, my parents treated me somewhat like an adult -- if I wanted something, I had to either save up money for it, or ask for it on special occasions (birthday, Christmas, etc). If I owned it, they also respected my ownership/privacy over it. Because of this, I feel like I grew up with a good sense of judgement, and a feeling like I could be trusted.

When I look at this list of rules with my "younger" eyes, I see a leash -- this isn't so much a present for me as much as an additional way to keep tabs/hold authority over for the mother. Children need to feel like they have some privacy, and I'm sorry, but knowing your parents can log in and see everything your doing, along with a laundry list of things you can't do makes things the kid might find fun suddenly an experience in anxiety.

What I want to know is, if the kid said no, and used his personal savings/worked a job to get his own phone, would the mom still have this list of things he would need to do, even if he never asked for a dime of help? My guess is yes -- which is why I think this isn't so much the mom helping her son as much as it is her helping herself.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were confusing to the smart kid who read them and found contradictory statements. Things like not using your phone in certain situations but also never ignoring calls from parents.

I wouldn't do it. It feels too authoritarian and there are a lot of things in there that are best learnt the hard way, or as and when it happens. And as has been said in other comments, this doesn't exactly seem like a present.

With the kid becoming a teen, it'd probably end up backfiring on the mother when he buys a burner to do all his sexting and banter.

Maybe it's just me, but I've always found rules this explicit in anything but a formal setting distasteful, regardless of how reasonable the rules are. This is one of the main things that pushed me out of university housing after freshman year. Rules everywhere, for everything!

My favorite living and working conditions are those where there are no rules simply because they aren't necessary--a very productive sort of anarchy. Now, this only works on a small scale with the right sort of people. In my mind, a family certainly qualifies, so I would really dislike a contract like this!

I suppose I just feel that petty rules and regulations just strip away my dignity. They seem to imply a profound lack of respect. They're also simply annoying.

On a more startup-related note, this is also one of the reasons I've really enjoyed my time at tiny (< 10 people) startups. They can, and often do, operate in essentially this sort of "anarchy" and are all the more productive for it. No need for pages and pages of company policy simply because everybody cooperates as-is.

Porn never came up in a conversation with your parents? I don't mean on a regular basis but... even once?

To be fair, it doesn't say the mom will look at everything, just that she could. It looks like she doesn't want him to use the phone in the same way everyone else uses their phones. Setting hours and encouraging him to leave it home and take less photos etc. says to me that she intends for him to limit his use of the device. In other words, she probably isn't policing the rest of his life the same way she is controlling his phone.