Too Much Texting

I have decided that unlimited texting is like an all-you-can-eat buffet. It is rarely a good idea to get your money’s worth.

This prompts me to review the plethora of strategies I have amassed over years of watching my waistline. They seem to fall into two basic categories: Be Intentional and Practice Moderation. Sounds like good advice for healthy eating and for healthy texting to me. Problem is, while self-regulation is tough for adults, it is a really tall order for our kids.

Much has been written about the dangers of excessive texting. Concerns run the gamut from cyber-bullying to text-related driving accidents. What I routinely observe is kids who may be physically present but often seem checked out, inhabiting a private, virtual world in the midst of the world in full swing around them. I see kids at parties, surrounded by food, festivities and friends; heads down, typing away. I watch adolescents in groups, sitting cheek to jowl, immersed in their own separate worlds; heads down, typing away. That they are often texting each other would be funny, if it didn’t feel sort of sad. And when, at a Super Bowl party, I observed a middle schooler I know continuously texting with a friend who had seats on the 50 yard line at the big game, it made me wonder what could ever be compelling enough to entice them to actually be present.

I wonder how a texting generation will develop the social maturity and interpersonal skills necessary to navigate complex relationships down the line. True, a lot has changed since I was growing up with only a family based land line – and a cord to tether me to the phone. But I imagine that at some point most kids will probably still choose to marry and start families of their own. How will they be prepared to work out the awkward bits, the nuances of intimate relationships, without the trial and error of uncomfortable adolescent conversations?

I imagine that I would likely have defaulted to texting myself at that age, given the chance. The mere memory of social gaffs I committed on the patchy road to increasing relational maturity is still enough to make me wince. But there seem to be few shortcuts in life worth taking. Fast forwarding to the kind of faux intimacy that texting seems to foster cannot result in expedited maturity. But I worry that it can leave kids with an unseen and unfortunate gap between an impressive façade of pseudo-sophistication and the reality of truncated social/emotional development.

We know a lot more about the human brain than we used to. The frontal lobe, responsible for self-regulation and decision making, does not appear to fully mature until the age of twenty-one or twenty-two. To augment our children’s still-evolving decision making skills we must be willing to step in.

When children are little we set sane bedtimes, knowing that few would tuck themselves in at a reasonable hour. We provide healthy meals, knowing that left to their own devices many kids would live on french fries and skittles. Adolescents need us in different ways, but their need is no less real. My husband and I have decided to limit our kids to the 250-texts-a-month plan for now. Is this decision draconian? Possibly. Is it subject to change? Absolutely. But it feels like a sane place to start.

There is no “right” way to address such issues. Helping guide our children through the tricky waters of adolescence requires that we pay attention, that we do our best to know who they are, and who they are becoming. We cannot be dogmatic. We have to be willing to grow right along with them, making adjustments along the way. And until their frontal lobes catch up with the rest of their growing selves, we must be willing to set reasonable boundaries and be parents.