Posted on 03/27/2011 10:36:14 PM PDT by raccoonradio
Texting teenagers who stay ‘on call’ all night pay the price in lost sleep
Brookline 10th-grader Ashley Olafsson sleeps with her cellphone under her pillow so she doesn’t miss “emergency’’ texts — “like if a friend broke up with her boyfriend.’’ Stephanie Kimball of Waltham, 14, is also available for urgent overnight correspondence, such as, “Hey, seeing if you’re awake.’’ Dedham ninth-grader Courtney Johnson gets as many as 100 texts while in bed. “I just don’t feel like myself if I don’t have my phone near me or I’m not on it,’’ she said.
Sure, all that middle-of-the-night communication leaves them tired, but as Olafsson explained, “It’s impolite not to respond if someone is coming to you with their problems.’’
With teenagers sending and receiving an average of 3,276 texts per month in the last quarter of 2010...it’s no wonder that Michael Rich, director of Children’s Hospital Boston’s Center on Media and Child Health, is starting to see young patients who come in exhausted by being “on call’’ or semi-alert all night as they wait for their phones to vibrate or ring with a text.
Children who text late into the night do not fall asleep as well, he said, and they don’t enter the deep sleep of Stage 4 REM sleep, “which is crucial to moving experiences and lessons of the day from short-term into long-term memory — in other words, completing the learning process.’’
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Take the kid’s phone and lock it in a drawer at night. Problem solved.
As usual, where are the parents?
The successful ones will avoid being consumed by the banal.
I blame the parents!
Why does a kid need a phone in the first place? If you are worried about their safety, get them a phone that can only call you or 911.
My son is 14. We make him leave his phone on the kitchen counter when he goes to bed.
And then there’s sexting:
>>In the New York Times, there‘s a sad and shocking story of how sexting altered one young girl’s life. She was only in eighth grade when it happened:
-— One day last winter Margarite posed naked before her bathroom mirror, held up her cellphone and took a picture. Then she sent the full-length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend. The couple broke up not too long after that. Then, Margarite’s ex-boyfriend forwarded her naked picture on to another girl. That girl forwarded the picture on to everyone in her cellphone contact list. Those people forwarded the picture on to more phones so that in less than 24 hours, hundreds–maybe even thousands–of people had seen a naked picture of Margarite.
—They broke up soon after. A few weeks later, Isaiah forwarded the photo to another eighth-grade girl, once a friend of Margarite’s. Around 11 o’clock at night, that girl slapped a text message on it.
— “Ho Alert!” she typed. “If you think this girl is a whore, then text this to all your friends.” Then she clicked open the long list of contacts on her phone and pressed “send.”
-— In less than 24 hours, the effect was as if Margarite, 14, had sauntered naked down the hallways of the four middle schools in this racially and economically diverse suburb of the state capital, Olympia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it. In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost.
I blinked twice! No, wait, THREE TIMES!
Three times? That's JUST SO AMAZING!
I blinked AGAIN!
(Repeat Until Dead)
Also, every cellphone can dial 911, regardless if it has a calling plan on it. So give your kids an old cellphone and keep it charged, that way you don’t waste money on a service plan or prepaid cards that expire.
At some point in time, the entirety of humanity shall fall silent. The only noise will be little key clicks.
1540 facebook friends. Wonder how many text her?
Wonder how many she's never even met?
Indispensable to me.
Woke up late yesterday wondering why the alarm did not sound. I thought it was near me... It was... I dropped it into a glass of water next to my bed the night before.
Disappointing on many levels.
Ironic that you post this at 1:36AM. lol
There is no particular age limit on idiots, although you would think that eventually this problem will take care of itself (unfortunately, in the process, others will suffer). We saw a woman texting(!) today while WAITING for a chance to make a left turn in heavy traffic, in a small SUV, WITH THE KIDS IN THE BACK...
WHAT can be so damned important? We were wondering if she one of those “supermoms” who is running a multinational corporation or orchestrating a leveraged buyout in between soccer practice and shopping.
I have a job where I am working or on-call 16 or more hours a day (but emergencies bad enough where I would get a call after hours are rare). Everyone involved knows that I will not answer the phone or read/answer a text while I’m driving, period.
The signal-to-noise ratio on this stuff is astounding. People really need to re-assess their priorities. At least you can learn quite a bit from spending some time reading on the Internet. Not while driving, please.
Addicted to texting just like the kid.
I refuse to buy text service on my phone.
I work on PCs for a living, and have lived long enough to see the world evolve from no PCs at all to the handheld devices we use today. I can say the following in complete seriousness and with the surety of experience that I know what I am talking about:
Texting has no value the way society has chosen to use it. It serves no purpose that enriches lives and for a great many is nothing more than a disease. To maintain a civil society there will eventually have to be a backlash against most text use in public. And I don’t mean laws I mean socially accepted behavior. We have to get to the point where even teenagers look at their friend during lunch and say, “Get off that damn thing already, it’s rude!”
Instant Messaging was initally pretty good. I like Yahoo Instant Messenger for example. People you know can send a message. It sits there patiently waiting. You can reply whenever you HAVE TIME. But somewhere along the line... we jumped from it being an aid to our lives, to it BEING our lives.
This kind of paper thin meaningless relationship with people extends to “friend lists.” Same disease. You don’t have 1000 friends. The word “friend” is diminished and damaged by Facebook. They aren’t friends. And even by dictionary definitions they are barely “acquaintences.”
“Strangers” is a better word for 950 of the 1000 people on your friends list that are getting the gritty details of your entire life.
Think hard on it. If you are old enough, think back 20 years. Is this really better? You know it isn’t. I’m no luddite. I love tech. But out of control texting is just not good.
Well good for you.....
You might have fished the cell phone out of the glass of water and installed it in your mouth....
prior to making a call on your false teeth....
and eating breakfast with difficulty.
“But out of control texting is just not good.”
I never understood the draw of texting. But, as I tell anybody that will listen, my eyes are too bad and my thumbs are to big for texting. However, I do like GETTING short texts from my wife or kids for some things rather than answering the phone and getting into a conversation. “Pick me up at 8”. “Buy milk too”.
And at the noisy arena the other night my wife called and I couldn’t hear a thing (bad ears too!). So I had my son text her to find out what was going on, and replied to my wife’s question on where to find something, and he texted her back.
*****************
From the article: “Children who text late into the night do not fall asleep as well..”
Boy - I’m glad that doesn’t happen to us adults on FR! ;)
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