Stateline Teen Amanda Schmidt punches away at another text message from her cell phone. "Pretty much all the time, constantly texting," Schmidt says. Most times, she doens't worry too much about what she's writing. "It's usually quick things, nothing real important," Schmidt said. But the 16-year-old says she would if Mom and Dad could see it. "You can't really let your parents know everything, probably get in a little trouble," Schmidt said. The good news for Schmidt is that her parents can only access her messages if they took her phone. Local carriers like Verizon say storing them on their end is impossible. "We've seen an average of 12 billion texts a month being sent just from Verizon, it wouldn't be a viable way to track or store those messages," said Erica Sevilla of Verizon. But there are ways for parents to track some information about your kids text messaging. One way is going online to looking at account. "If their child has an account with us, and they wanted to view how many messages are being sent or to which number," Sevilla said. There's also program to keep spam away from your cell phone. "They have the option to literally filter out unwanted messages. It's called text blocking," Sevilla said. Blocking out everything from the internet if you want. And make sure that next message alert from your child's phone is from someone they know.
If you have Verizon you can sign up for that text blocking program online. The company also urges parents to talk with their kids about text messaging as well. U-S Cellular told us they also don't store text messages because they can add so much. But parents can get details like numbers and when the message took place from their bills.