Teens and Extreme Texting
June 3rd, 2009
I had my epiphany on the perils of teen texting about four months ago, when I opened my T-Mobile bill for December. It was $200 higher than the usual monthly charge because of a singular amount of texting one day in December from my daughter’s phone: some (OMG!) 400 messages.
Never mind that my 14-year-old swore up and down that she didn’t do it because her phone (an antique from early this century) was too old for her to text easily, that she had a fever of 102 that day and appeared to have been sleeping during the pertinent hours, that never before had our text message volume exceeded our 400-texts-a-month joint allotment—T-Mobile wasn’t buying any of my protestations. The customer service manager (yes, I argued up to the manager level) was even more scornful than the rep: “She’s a teenager. Believe me, they can text even when they have a fever.”
We never solved that mystery. So as soon as our contract with T-Mobile expired two months later, we jumped to another company and took an unlimited text messaging plan. I didn’t want to expose myself to such charges again but was unwilling to relinquish a useful stealth tool for my daughter to check in with me when she’s with her friends.
Now I may seem a fool. No, I don’t think I was wrong to give my daughter the benefit of a doubt, but according to a New York Times piece on teen texting, by making unlimited messaging available I may be making my kid vulnerable to a multitude of ills: “anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury, and sleep deprivation.”
The Times cited a Nielsen study saying that spurred by unlimited text plans, American teens sent an average of 80 text messages a day in the fourth quarter of 2008, almost double the average the year before.
It interviewed Dr. Martin Joffe, a California pediatrician who recently surveyed students at two high schools and found that kids were leaving their cell phones turned on through the night and were responding to texts at all hours. “That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.”
Meanwhile Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at MIT, said that texting might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop, as the phone link (the reason I like texts) makes it harder for kids to separate from their parents. And, the piece said, texting may be taking a toll on teens’ thumbs, citing the case of Annie Wagner, a 9th grader from Bethesda, Md., who developed cramping in her digits that only eased after she changed phone and texted more slowly.
Yes, I worry about how technology is affecting my daughter’s maturation and the way she relates to others, but I think we would do parents a disfavor if we single out texting. A site called InjuryBoard.com, citing an American Journal of Psychiatry report, warns about Internet compulsive behavior and lists excessive gaming, e-mail, and virtual sex, in addition to texting, as culprits. (One symptom: A constant need for more time with your computer and to upgrade your equipment.)
If I’m worried about my kid abusing technology, I’d regulate (and I am) her use of all the gadgets in her tool kit, not just text.
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