Texting damaging teens’ minds & health.

Texting damaging teens’ minds & health
Paediatricians Say Habit Causing Anxiety, Insomnia, Dumbness Among Youth
Katie Hafner - Times of India - NYT NEWS SERVICE
 

    They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt. Spurred by unlimited texting plans, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company—almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier. 

    The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation. Dr Martin Joffe, a paediatrician in Greenbrae, California, recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.
    “That’s one every few minutes,” he said. “Then you hear that these kids are responding to texts late at night. That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.” The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop. “Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.” 

    Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’” As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind. If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high. So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”
    

Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, California, said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm. Texting may also be taking a toll on teenagers’ thumbs. Annie Wagner, 15, a ninth-grade honour student in Bethesda, Maryland, used to text on her tiny phone as fast as she typed on a regular keyboard. A few months ago, she noticed a painful cramping in her thumbs. 

    Peter Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, said it was too early to tell whether this kind of stress is damaging. But he added, “Based on our experiences with computer users, we know intensive repetitive use of the upper extremities can lead to musculoskeletal disorders, so we have some reason to be concerned that too much texting could lead to temporary or permanent damage to the thumbs.”