The other night I was driving to Hunt Valley Mall to pick my son up from a late movie.  While I was driving on Route 83, my cell phone indicated that I had received a message.  Thinking my son may have left me a voicemail about a change of plans, I glanced at the phone.  He had sent me a text message.  This left me with a variety of choices, none of which really appealed to me.  I could read the message while driving 65 miles an hour,  I could pull over to the shoulder , or I could continue on my way and ignore the message.  I chose to ignore the message for the time being.  But I couldn’t help thinking about why my son would send me something to read when he knew I was driving, and I also thought about the fact that he is a new driver himself.

A few days later, I saw an article from the New York Times called “Texting May Be Taking a Toll.”  The writer reported that according to the Nielson Company, American teenagers are receiving an average of 80 messages a day.  This new means of communication is starting to concern physicians, psychologists, educators, and parents, who observe that texting is causing sleep deprivation, distraction in school, and poor grades.  Psychologist Sherry Turkle, who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied the texting habits of teenagers.  She believes texting may be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.  Turkle is concerned that texting affects a teenager’s ability to become autonomous.

I can only speak about what I have seen and heard.  Texting is all around me.  It has become the preferred way for my son to communicate with me when he is out. But how can a person concentrate on thinking something through if his phone is constantly buzzing and he is constantly checking to see if it buzzed?  How can a teenager separate from her parents and learn to become autonomous when she can text every question or decision to Mom and Dad?  What is happening to kids’ ability to take the time and solitude to reason and reach decisions on their own?

A lot of children may say that parents have no right to complain about texting since Mom and Dad may be just as dependent on their BlackBerry.  Kids may not grasp the difference between a parent checking in at work with their PDA and a child texting his or her friends 80 times a day.  I think this topic could make for some lively dinner conversation, leading to healthy limit setting and maybe even a lower phone bill!

Donna Kane, MA, Jewish Community Services, Baltimore, Maryland

JCS offers addictions treatment, as well as prevention education for children, teens, parents and professionals.  For more information, call 410-466-9200 or visit http://www.jcsbaltimore.org.

Kids should be told that texting is just like using the phone (which it really is). That is, you wouldn’t make a phone call when a teacher is teaching or in the middle of a movie—and certainly not when driving a car.