Explosion In Teen Texting May Have Unexpected Costs
According to a recent report, a new epidemic is spreading quickly through America’s youth and increasing in severity.Â
Encouraged by cell phone contracts that feature unlimited texting plans, American teenagers have more than doubled the number of text messages they send and receive compared to just one year ago. According to Nielsen, in the fourth quarter of 2008, U.S. teens sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month, or nearly 80 a day.
This mind-boggling statistic has more than a few physicians and psychologists across the country concerned about the long term physical and mental health consequences of such hyper-connectivity.
According to the New York Times, California pediatrician Dr. Martin Joffe recently conducted a small survey at two high schools in Marin Country. He said his results showed that it wasn’t uncommon for some students to send and receive several hundred text messages per day.
“That’s one every few minutes,” said Joffe. “Then you hear that these kids are responding to texts late at night. That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.”
The immense surge in texting is still too recent a phenomenon to have permitted any thorough scientific studies on potential health consequences. However, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle has spent the last three years studying teenage texting in the Boston area, and she believes it could be causing a change in adolescent development patterns.
“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she explained. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”
During normal adolescent development, Turkle explained, young people should begin to break away from their parents as they gradually acquire independence and self-sufficiency.Â
“But if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, “˜Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’”
Another potential psychological side effect of incessant texting may be the inability to concentrate and focus on meaningful and reflective thoughts.
“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” Turkle added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”
Oakland, Calif. psychotherapist Michael Hausauer has a more ambivalent opinion of the texting boom, seeing in it the possibility for both benefit and harm. He told the Times that young people have developed a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.”
“Texting can be an enormous tool. It offers companionship and the promise of connectedness. At the same time, texting can make a youngster feel frightened and overly exposed,” Hausauer explained.
A number of experts are worried not just about the deleterious psychological potential of intensive texting, but also concerned about long term physiological complications that could result from so much fast and furious thumb-work.
“Based on our experiences with computer users, we know intensive repetitive use of the upper extremities can lead to musculoskeletal disorders,” said Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational sciences at the University of Washington.
“We have some reason to be concerned that too much texting could lead to temporary or permanent damage to the thumbs,” he said, while adding that it is still too early to conclusively determine whether this will in fact be the case.
Though the majority of U.S. schools have a strict “˜no cell phone in class’ policy, such rules have proven hard to enforce as the phones get ever smaller and kids get ever more resourceful in hiding the contraband.
Many teachers are clueless, while others say they are simply overwhelmed by the task of trying to police their classes for texting students.
“It’s a huge issue, and it’s rampant,” said Deborah Yager, a chemistry teacher in Castro Valley, Calif. “I can’t tell when it’s happening, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
CLUELESS PARENTS?
Dr. Joffe explained that parents of teenagers are far less likely to take note of their child’s texting habits than they are of other more obvious forms of media use like television or web surfing. Additionally, the rise of unlimited texting packages to cell phone contracts has meant that most parents have stopped paying attention to the details of their monthly billing statements.
“I talk to parents in the office now. I’m quizzing them [about their child's texting], and no one is thinking about this,” said Joffe.
Some parents, however, are beginning to take notice and take action. Journalist Greg Hardesty of Lake Forest, Calif. said that his 13-year-old daughter sent and received over 14,500 text messages in one month last year, after which he wrote a column about her in his newspaper, The Orange County Register. The following month, he said she exchanged some 24,000 texts in the wake of the attention that she got from his article.
When her grades took a subsequent nose dive, Hardesty decided it was time to take away the cell phone until her grades improved. Now, she’s been given back her phone, but under the conditions that she limits her messages to 5,000 per month and doesn’t text between 9 p.m. and 6 p.m. on school days.
Still, Hardesty’s daughter Reina expressed an aggrieved sense of justice on the matter, pointing to her mother who she says spends the whole day talking on her iPhone.
Professor Turkle said she understands where the teens are coming from, adding that they often “feel they are being punished for behavior in which their parents indulge.”
Turkle maintains that even 21st century adolescents still need their parents’ undivided attention sometimes.
“Even though they text 3,500 messages a week, when they walk out of their ballet lesson, they’re upset to see their dad in the car on the BlackBerry,” she explained. “The fantasy of every adolescent is that the parent is there, waiting, expectant, completely there for them.”
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