Four tips to ease the ‘get to school’ rush

If any of America’s estimated 70 million schoolchildren is yours, you may be glad to learn about four steps toward making the morning rush a little more relaxed.1. First, the best thing you can do for the morning is to start the night before. Pack everyone’s lunch, pick out the next day’s outfit and make sure it has all its buttons and that the socks match, make sure homework is in the backpack and review the next day’s schedule.2. You don’t have to do it all yourself. Assign simple tasks. Teach your kids to plan the breakfast menu, set the table for breakfast and make their own beds.3. Keep a binder or bulletin board for important papers — permission slips, test entry cards and the like — that kids bring home from school so you never have to search for them.4. If yours are like most kids these days, they have their own mobile phones, tablets, music players and so on. If so, make sure everything they want to take with them is properly charged.You should also be sure your children understand about responsible mobile phone and computer use and wireless common sense. For one thing, no one should ever send or read texts or email while driving, biking or walking across the street. For another, you and your child should have a pin or password that locks the screen.It may also be a good idea to download parental monitoring and control apps. A wide variety are available that help parents track their kids’ location and monitor content of their text messages and email, photos and Web history. Family apps available from Sprint include Sprint Mobile Controls, Sprint Family Locator and Sprint Drive First.Here are a few more facts on smartphones, from a survey by Sprint and Techlicious, that may be of interest to parents and children:• Thirty-two percent of parents set rules for how their kids use their smartphone.• Seventeen percent of parents have different rules for how kids use smartphones on weekdays compared to how they use them on weekends.• City parents are more inclined to give kids smartphone rules and use monitoring apps than are suburbanites.• Seventy-seven percent of kids know parents use parental monitoring apps.• Older parents are far less likely than younger ones to tell their kids they’re monitoring them.• Parents who have Apple devices use parental monitoring more often than Android users do.• Twelve- to 14-year-olds top the list for first-time smartphone ownership.For further information on kids and smartphones, visit

https://familysafety.sprint.com and 4NetSafety.com.