Video: Apps and Children, Anything Could Happen

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LOWNDES COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI)- We have all done it. Handing your toddler an IPad or Smart phone in a restaurant to keep them busy.  What happens, however, when they push the wrong buttons?

Many parents use their smart devices as a form of entertainment for their children while they are out in public. Rachel Huwe, a mother of three, remembers the time she was out to lunch with friends and did just that.

“I, of course, was trying to feed two kids and keep up with the conversation with friends and I gave her my cell phone,” says Rachel Huwe.

It wasn’t until a friend at the table received a Skype request that they realized Abby wasn’t just playing a game on the smart phone.

“Who is this girl this contact trying to Skype me? Do any of you know who this is so? So he goes well I’m going to answer it once we find out it’s a friend of everybody at the table and low and behold Abbie’s two year-old face is what’s on the other side of Skype account,” says Huwe.

Rachel says, no matter their age, children can access programs on smart phones.

“You can turn your head for five seconds or you can even be watching them on it and they’ll do things you never realized,” says Huwe.

Today’s smart-phone-gone-wrong stories are similar to those times where children would dial long distance on land lines.

“Do you remember getting in trouble back in the day for talking on long distance when you weren’t suppose to or that your parents would freak out when they saw you holding the land line phone? It’s kind of that now these days. I guess you’re right that’s the closest our parents had to deal with. At&T probably didn’t refund their money whenever you called Japan, back in the day,” says Karen Stanley.

Karen Stanley, the owner of Neon Frog says she too experienced a similar situation when her son bought 40-dollars worth of Spongbob DVDs.

“You have to be really very careful with keeping your password up to date and kids watch. They pay attention to when you enter that password in so they can play with it so that is what happened with us. He had figured out our password and didn’t know he was doing something wrong didn’t realize he was spending money he just wanted Spongebob,” says Stanley.

Stanley says as time goes on, companies may not be as lenient with future “accidental” purchases.

“I think they are going to start putting that responsibility on the owners of the phone or the IPad or whatever technical device it is to make some of those purchases aren’t made by their children,” says Stanley.

You never know what you will end up owning the next time you hand your child your smart phone. There was a 14-month toddler in Oregon who purchased a car on EBAY when playing on her parent’s smart phone.

Categories: Local News

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