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Families 181Dana: Yeah, but you . . . like when I first . . . uh-huh, when I started talkin’to ‘im, when I started with my man, I was like, “You got Sprint, right?”[laughter] ‘Cause I got worried, because then I’m the one that gets introuble because I don’t work, you know, and I gotta be careful with mymom, and text messages . . . they be like fifteen cents per message, andwhen my mom finds out that the bill is more, I’ll be like, “I don’t know,it’s probably because my phone is modern,” and that’s my lie because myman’ll be like, “Well, I miss ya,” and I’m like, “Yo, stop text messaging me,‘cause they charge,” and then he’ll keep on, but . . .Christo: So you don’t have a text-messaging plan?Dana: Nah.Christo: Who . . . your boyfriend will text message you?Dana: Yeah, all the time, and my mom will . . . he always sends mepictures, too, and my mom she’ll be killin’ me. Like she don’t know it yet,but I told her that, “Oh,” I lied, “Oh, I was talkin’ to my friend fromGeorgia, and she sent me a text message and I had to write back to her.”“All right, don’t do it again,” so I haven’t been using text messages.This situation differs dramatically from that of low-income and workingclasskids such as Elena, a sixteen-year-old of Armenian descent, who isnot on her parent’s family plan and therefore must maintain a continuouscycle of credit on her own. Elena clarified her situation to C. J. Pascoe(Living Digital):We are all independent kind of thing because we don’t have jobs kind of thing. Mysister has a job. And we won’t be able to afford if there’s a plan kind of thing. Butmy mom and my dad have a plan. But all the kids, like me, my sister, and mybrother, have pay-as-you-go cell phones.When she ran out of money, her phone number could not be renewedand she lost the number. After losing her phone, which in many lowincomefamilies can be akin to losing one’s identity (see Horst and Miller2006), Elena started negotiating with her brother to buy his old mobilephone. In contrast to kids in middle-class families, working-class andlow-income kids such as Elena are often acutely aware of the cost of calls(Chin 2001).Alongside controlling and managing costs, owning a phone gives kidsand parents more freedom to control how and when they use their phonesand their private communication. One mother named Geena in SiliconValley mentioned that she bought a keyboard-enabled phone on which