r e s m a r t e d

Technology continues to eat souls of children

Teens are not just texting, instant-messaging and surfing Facebook all day; they’re sleeping with their cellphones or laptops, too. Or rather, not sleeping. And doctors and parents, many of them raised in an era when phones were attached to walls, are concerned.

“So many teens are having sleep issues, and parents aren’t necessarily regulating the use of the electronic devices enough,” says Margie Ryerson, a Walnut Creek, Calif., therapist who specializes in adolescent issues. “It’s impossible to wind down and relax the body, the mind, the senses and be ready to fall asleep.”

The texting doesn’t stop, she says, even after Mom and Dad are snoring softly in their beds. One of Ryerson’s clients discovered her 17-year-old daughter was sending more than 3,000 text messages per month, many in the wee hours.

Of course, for every obsessive texter, there’s a teen, “tween” or college student who simply turns off the phone at bedtime. But even the averages are extraordinary. A 2009 Nielsen study on teens and media found a 566 percent jump in teen texting rates during the past two years. The average teen sent 435 texts a month in early 2007. Now it’s 2,899 per month — 97 a day.

Teens are texting on the bus, in class, at dinner and in bed. It’s the bed part that’s worrying experts.

A Belgian study published last month found that late-night texting is affecting the sleep cycles of 44 percent of that country’s 16-year-olds. Some 21 percent are waking up one to three times a month to answer a text message, according to the Leuven Study on Media and Adolescent Health; it’s a weekly occurrence for 11 percent of the teens, and a nightly or every-other-night wake-up call for 12 percent.

“We all know teens don’t get enough sleep in general,” says San Francisco youth culture expert Anastasia Goodstein. “As long as parents allow teens to have these devices in their bedrooms at night, teens will be tempted to use them. “… Teens would socialize 24/7 if they could — especially if it’s with a girlfriend or boyfriend.”

Ryerson calls it the CNN syndrome of teenhood — round-the-clock reports on breaking news about everything from homework to wardrobe choices to Starbucks cravings.

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I wish I had been forced into fresh air a little more often than I was. Actually, I wish I were still. I can’t imagine having a sidekick (back in the days of working data plans) when I was a teenager. I already feel embarrassed as a nearly 24 year old using one and I am used to 100 texts a day on average. To be fair, I rarely make phone calls and am just easier to communicate with in writing. Maybe that’s all it is for some of these kids, but still. Something about the ability to express your thoughts constantly and the way people are so completely available to each other on every wavelength is a nice idea in theory but inevitably shows a lot of gross sides to people you don’t care to see, not to mention show off yourself. I’m posting this piece of info in the wee hours of the morning and sometimes it’s just nicer to have a night of silence to sit and think to yourself rather than wasting it with relaxed nerves and dreamless sleep. It really is a blatant form of self-indulgence and one can’t be certain if it at all contributes to personal development or just kicks us even further away from that direction entirely as we are too busy feeding our blog-loving egos to notice. Either way, thanks a lot for making me get a cell phone at nineteen, Mom.