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178 Heather A. HorstMaking, Breaking, and Bending the RulesAs we have outlined, parents use space and time to help guide their kids’use of new media at home. Throughout many of our interviews, parentsreadily articulated the various rules they attempted to establish as well ashow these rules reflected their beliefs about new media. Kids, by contrast,often claimed to forget rules, or stated that their parents made rules butthat they were either open to negotiation or not regularly enforced. Hoodet al. (2004) found in their Colorado-based study that the family discoursesurrounding new media reflected the parents’ intentions rather than actualpractices. Rather than defining this discourse as failure or irony, Alters(2004) argues that rules are “part of the family’s project of building andmaintaining a family identity” (128) and, for this reason, parents becomeinvested in the rules and the importance of having rules, although theyacknowledge that breaking and bending the rules regularly occurs. These“media transgressions,” or points at which the normal, discursive rules arebent, were pervasive among all families who struggled to uphold theirown rules on a daily basis (Alters and Clark 2004a; Clark 2004). In thissection, we focus on young people’s engagements with mobile phonesand online spaces, with particular attention to the ways in which parentsand kids make, break, and bend the rules.Plans, Minutes, and CardsThe decision to give a son or daughter a mobile phone is often motivated bythe desire to maintain a sense of control over kids’ movements and activities.While parents value the leash function of mobile phones, they also strugglewith the day-to-day management of their kids’ phone use. Typically, parentsof younger kids attempt to restrict the number and types of people enteredinto their kids’ phones. Indeed, companies such as LG, which makes theMigo, and Firefly Communications, which sells the Firefly mobile phone,have attempted to capitalize on parents’ desires in their design and marketingof a phone that restricts calls to a small number of people or places (inthese phones “Home” is marked as the most important number in thephones). Other parents try to control the extent to which their kids makecalls on the mobile phone by providing the phone on a need-to-use basis,such as buying a “kids’ phone” to be shared among siblings. This oftenresults in conflicts, particularly if one sibling decides to assume ownership