Teenagers and Texting: Hazardous or Harmless?

Cell-phone texting has become the preferred channel of basic communication between teens and their friends, with cell calling a close second. One in three teens sends more than 100 text messages a day, or 3000 texts a month. Some 75% of 12-17 year-olds now own cell phones, up from 45% in 2004. Those phones have become indispensable tools in teen communication patterns, and for many parents, teens' attachment to their phones is an area of conflict and regulation.

Teens are texting almost 80 messages a day – at school, on the bus, during dinner, and in bed late at night, and the number of teen texters are on the sharp rise since 2006. As of 2009, more than half of teens (54%) were found to be daily texters.

Do you remember back then when chatting on the Internet was the trend?  Well, with mobile phone technology bringing you the ability to send text to other phones, chatting has gone mobile. Like its predecessor, texting can be quite dangerous and hazardous especially when children do it with reckless abandon, most especially teens. In fact, many children have regressed in their development because of texting.

It calls parents and professionals to wonder, what effect is this having on teens’ education, health and well-being? Do you think teen texting is harmless or harmful?

Teens and the Internet: how much is too much?

Most stories about adolescents and the internet underscore the very real dangers of cyberbullies, sexual predators, and on-line scams that imperil unsuspecting, vulnerable teens. Another risk? The teens themselves. Many spend hours on-line, e-mailing, instant messaging, downloading music, and updating Facebook pages, with some visiting game sites, shopping, and gambling on-line. All of this access can be dangerous; those who abuse the internet can become trapped in a cyber riptide of sorts, pulled in further and further as their time on-line increases, their school performance declines, and their family and peer relationships begin to suffer.

Take Melanie (not her real name), a sixteen-year-old Greenwich Village student, who spent up to seven hours a day updating her Face book page and instant messaging with friends. When her previously high grades began to drop, her parents confiscated her desktop, and Melanie threatened to leave home.

"For an entire year I saw nothing but the back of my daughter's head," Melanie's dad explains. "So I took the computer away. When she became inconsolable and accused us of ruining her social life--she couldn't update her Face book page--we knew there was a serious problem."

Turned out, Melanie was down and out over a flirtation with a boy that had gone nowhere. Once she and her parents began to talk about what was bothering her, their home situation improved dramatically.The family worked it out and she stayed put--with the help of intensive outpatient therapy.

Was Melanie's a case of harmless teen tweeting and more, or a sign of a dangerous problem? Many parents wonder, how much on-line activity is too much? Though internet addiction is not yet a bona fide psychiatric diagnosis, psychiatrists and psychologists are calling for more research, so they can include it in future editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel (DSM), the bible and last word on diagnosis and disorders for therapists, hospitals, clinics, and insurers.

Who is at risk?

Experts agree teens who struggle with internet overuse do not fit a single profile. Heavy users can be socially linked-in, popular adolescents who make good grades. They might spend hours chatting online with friends, posting photos and updates on social media sites. On the other end of the continuum are the isolated, socially anxious teens. They might be teased, bullied, and avoid school altogether. Desperate to meet people and connect, they might surf the web and visit chat rooms and game sites to the exclusion of all else.

How to determine if a teen has a problem?

 While all may seem well, overuse of the internet might be hidden behind deeper problems such as depression, anxiety, substance use or eating disorders, and learning or conduct problems.

Often the problem becomes first apparent in the school setting. "Parents might first notice slippage in school performance. They eventually throw up their hands when any attempt to regulate computer use or limit access quickly devolves into defiance and angry outbursts," says Dr. Eric Teitel, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Manhattan, and a faculty member of the NYU School of Medicine.

In older adolescents (18-25), the profile might differ-though just as with a younger adolescent you might first notice absenteeism from work or school. For people in this age group, internet use is frequently intertwined with sex, gambling, eating disorders, or drug problems, as well as depression or anxiety. Others might spend hours playing on-line poker or shopping, and become increasingly single-minded and isolated.

Teens might be on-line because they are already depressed, anxious, and lonely. Or they might become so, if forced to give up their habit. Signs and symptoms of withdrawal anxiety in a child include: difficulty concentrating, pacing, irritable and stressed mood, and fidgeting.

Other signs your child could have a problem with internet overuse? In addition to a decline in school performance and grades, signs might include repeated surfing or e-mailing during class time, difficulty concentrating and falling asleep in class, hours of night-time use, frequent complaints of being tired, school lateness or absenteeism, and withdrawal from all activities such as sports practices, friends, social engagements and music lessons. Racking up bills for such things as on- line gambling or shopping is also a sign a child is spending too much time on-line.

Read the whole article here.

 

Which teens may be more likely to develop Internet addiction?

Work Smart: Stop Multitasking and Start Doing One Thing ...

A human's ability to do several things at once is a wonder of biology: it means we can eat a burrito while we walk down the street and listen to music and daydream about the weekend all at the same time. But some kinds of multitasking costs you more time than you save.

Doing two things at once, like singing while you take a shower, is not the same as instant messaging while writing a research report. Don't fool yourself into thinking you can multitask jobs that need your full attention. You're not really having a conversation while you write; you're shifting your attention back and forth between the two activities quickly. You're juggling. When you juggle tasks, your work suffers AND takes longer--because switching tasks costs.

When your brain switches its attention from one task to another, it takes time to get into a new train of thought. You lose any momentum you had on the first task, which costs you on the next switch. On the internet or in an office where distractions ...

"Multi-taskers" are bad at one thing: multi-tasking

People who text-message while listening to an iPod while reading the newspaper probably think they are good at "multi-tasking." They are wrong, according to a study published Monday.

By Amy Norton

Researchers at Stanford University found that college students who made a habit of immersing themselves in various media at once were not very skilled at tests of memory, attention and, ironically, "task-switching."

In a nutshell, "they're terrible at multi-tasking," Dr. Clifford Nass, one of the researchers on the work, told Reuters Health in an interview. The findings, published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are surprising, the researchers admit. The findings also suggest that today's array of devices that make multi-tasking possible, and supposedly easy, may not be a good thing.

Going into the study, Nass said, he and his colleagues assumed that "heavy multi-taskers" must have some innate ability that allowed them to handle several tasks at once. Maybe they were good at filtering out irrelevant distractions from their environment, the researchers hypothesized.

But a simple cognitive test of such filtering -- where test-takers were asked to focus on the characteristics of a group of red triangles while ignoring a few extraneous blue triangles -- showed that multi- taskers performed more poorly than people who were not prone to media multi-tasking

The same was true when study participants took a test that measures the brain's ability to organize and file away information, and when they took a test of task-switching. The multi-taskers were actually slower to shift their attention from one test task to another.

The study included 262 college undergraduates who filled out questionnaires on their media use -- how often they went online, watched TV, read, listened to music, emailed and text-messaged, and how often they did a few of those things at once. Students classified as either heavy or light media multi-taskers then took the series of cognitive tests. While the results suggest that heavy multi-taskers are not actually good at what they do, the reasons for that are not clear, Nass said.

Overexposure to too many media distractions may be at fault -- or it may be that people who are "born bad multi-taskers" are, ironically, more drawn to doing it.

It's possible, according to Nass and his colleagues, that heavy multi- taskers tend to have a generally "exploratory" orientation: they simply like to gather lots of information, even if that means sacrificing their performance on the task at hand.

But whether heavy media multi-tasking causes the differences seen in this study or not, Nass said, the implication would seem to be the same: "Heavy multi-taskers should stop doing it."

"Society is developing tools all the time to make multi-tasking easier," he said. "The question is whether that's a good thing."