R U up? Kids texting at all hours
When I was a kid I used to love reading long into the night. Just like in those cliché scenes from movies, I would get under the covers with a flashlight and a book and read until the wee hours.
I suppose that’s why I’ve never been much of a morning person. It was very difficult to get out of bed at 7:30 AM following one of those long nights. I’d swear to myself that I’d go to sleep earlier next night, but no. Some character from whatever book I was reading would reach out and pull me in, and the next thing I knew it was another battle to stay awake and get through a few more pages.
I think some kids still do that, which may or may not be a good thing (for bibliophiles like me, it’s hard to declare reading a harmful activity under any circumstances). However, the new phenomenon is for kids to dive under the covers for all night text messaging sessions on their mobile phones.
According to a HarrisInteractive poll reported on this Pantagrapy.com article, sixty percent of (presumably American) teens use text messaging. Verizon Wireless alone tracked 22.3 billion text messages in the first three months of 2007. According to a Teenage Research Unlimited study reported by the Express-Times of NJ.com, almost 25% of teenagers in a relationship have used their mobiles to talk to, or text, their boyfriend or girlfriend between midnight and 5:00AM.
All that sleep deprivation can’t be a good thing. Some parents are taking matters into their own hands by insisting their kids leave their phones in a charger in the kitchen or some other common area at night. Other parents comb through their kids’ billing records to see if they’ve been sending messages at odd hours. These aren’t exactly elegant solutions.
Some mobile providers let you disable text messaging on the children’s phones, but there generally is no time factor involved – texting is either enabled or disabled. If there was ever a way to start a war with your kids at home, it would be by totally blocking their ability to text!
Anastasia Goodstein, on the other hand, doesn’t think late night texting is necessarily a bad thing. In her new book Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online, she proposes that kids are fundamentally no different now than they were in the 1980s or even the 1950s. All that has changed, she says, is the media they use.
She makes a very good point. After all, teenagers need to find their own boundaries, although some guidance from parents is recommended. But what about younger kids? I can’t imagine anything good coming from a twelve-year-old texting his friends at 3:00AM, just as I reluctantly admit that I probably shouldn’t have been under the covers reading Stephen King at 3:00AM back when I was 12.
A better solution is to use a phone service that lets you turn off selected functions, such as voice and/or texting, during specific hours that you choose, such as bed time or study time. The technology exists to do so, and several carriers offer it.
That’s it. No monitoring of the phone is needed, no combing through call records. No remembering to leave the phone in the kitchen every night. A set-it-and-forget-it approach like that sounds a lot better than having to remember to confiscate your kids’ phones every night.
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