Mobile phone companies target youngsters as customers

• Steven LeVesque peered at a picture of the new Firefly cell phone and declared, "That's the phone for me!"
• The boy's admiration should hearten the makers of the phone for preteens.
• Sure, the phone has slick features that allow parents control over their kids' calling activity.
• Firefly Mobile will soon discover how many parents think like Amy LeVesque as the Lincolnshire firm tries to conquer the last, great untapped mobile phone demographic: kids.
• It's a unique market, one where the ultimate consumer -- the child -- won't make the buying decision.
• Parents these days are more harried and more worried about their children's safety -- two key factors that Firefly is counting on to sell phones.
• The answer, at least to one University of Chicago child psychiatrist, is that most 8-to-12-year-olds do not need one.
• Cell phones have become so ubiquitous that an estimated 78 percent of all Americans ages 19 to 64 owned one in 2004, according to The Yankee Group.
• Cell phone-makers are the latest group of marketers to turn to preteens as their next market to conquer, following a host of other industries ranging from food companies to retailers.
• Wherify, a California company, plans this spring to offer a kid phone that comes with a Global Positioning System locator--so parents can better track their offspring.
• Those controls helped sell Cincinnati resident Nicole McKinney-Bach and her husband on a Firefly for Brittini, their 7-year-old daughter.
• Parents are increasingly giving kids phones for emergencies and easy access to mom and dad, the National Association of Elementary School Principals March newsletter concluded.
• Neither her former school in Louisville nor the Robert Frost School in Bourbonnais, where she is principal now, allow cell phones.
• At 10, Ryan is always under the oversight of his parents or a parental proxy--like a teacher, Scott Hoek said.