Connected, exhausted

Boston Globe ^ | 3/27/11 | Beth Teitell

[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.’’

[Lysandru]

My son is 14. We make him leave his phone on the kitchen counter when he goes to bed.

Bingo!

[wally_bert]

I see so much of that. A lot of people I run into in my side ventures (I don’t hire them) will, even if they have a spare 30 seconds text and text. Wouldn’t that get old or constantly being on a phone, esp. with an earpiece? Apparently it doesn’t.

I have no texting plan and don’t want one. People think I am backwards or something.

[perez24]

I use my son’s cell phone as an alarm clock...no more overnight texts!!!!

[raccoonradio]

There’s a radio public service announcement with a young boy either IM-ing or texting (prob. the former actually). He types to his “friend” that he’s never met in person that “we have so much in common, parents can be such a pain!” The person he’s IM-ing or texting says “Let’s go to the park and meet up. We’ll wear our baseball caps backwards...I’m not
telling MY folks!” As he says this his voice gets deeper and deeper. In other words this “kid” is an adult perv who wants to meet up with a young boy...

[Boogieman]

I’m a tech guy also, and I agree with everything you said. I don’t text, I don’t have fb, in fact, I don’t even have a cell phone anymore, but I am probably going to have to change that, just for work and emergencies. The worst part of all this is that, it detracts from real-life relationships for a lot of people. Even if you are texting your real-life friends and relatives, it’s so much more impersonal, and it can’t be good for maintaining a relationship if that starts to become the primary means of communication.