Teenagers have many avenues to communicate but texting with text messaging becoming part of their daily lives, cracks are beginning to appear.
The most popular form of communications between teenagers today is instant text messaging . The convenience of it is too easy – a thought comes into the brain, the thought is communicated immediately to one or more parties before the owner of the thought has even dissected what has been sent. The understanding the text message is permanent and could have detrimental consequences if misunderstood or passed onto someone it wasn’t intended for.
Teenagers can be emotional and irrational caused by hormonal changes but add to the mix the complication of hearing almost every thought from your friends and acquaintances – good or bad, and the ability to react to these thoughts immediately without really thinking it through. The old fashioned idea ‘sleeping on it’ or ‘biting your tongue’ no longer holds merit in the teenage world. After the message is sent, it cannot be retracted or denied and can potentially be forwarded to more parties than the intended recipient.
Texting disorders
Four texting disorders have been discovered amongst teenagers.
- Textiety – a feeling of anxiety from not receiving or sending messages.
- Binge texting – sending multiple texts to boost self-esteem and to attract a high volume of responses.
- Textaphrenia – hearing messages arrive or feeling message vibration alert when no message arrive.
- Post Traumatic Text Disorder – injuries related to messaging such as walking into objects while not paying attention to the surroundings.
These texting disorders add more complications to an already complicated life of a teenager. With a lack of understanding of just how deep these disorders reach, teenagers deserve the guiding hand of adult supervision when using a cell phone. As much as most teenagers would disapprove of their texting being monitored, with new disorders appearing and minimal expertise on rectifying the problems, teenagers require guidance.
Ways to prevent texting disorders
There are several techniques to prevent adolescents from developing texting issues.
- Adult Supervision – monitoring the time a teenager spends texting.
- Night break – make sure all cell phones are left in a common area of the home at night time, never to be taken into the bedroom when sleeping.
- Limited Allowance – limit the teenagers allowance of the phone plan so limited texts can be sent per month.
- Block receivers – when a teenager is learning the art of texting, limit the people they can receive messages from to avoid multiple texting.
- Be a teacher – sit with the teenager and together understand the pitfalls of text messaging such as when you hit send it is out in the world forever, cannot be retracted.
- Face to face communication – if the message you are sending is not something you can say face to face to the recipient, do not send.
- Consequences – understand that the teenagers future can be jepordised with pornographic material sent via messaging.
- Patience – when receiving a message that has created an emotional reaction, wait an hour or better a day before responding. Time delay makes the responding message clearer and more thoughtful.
- Other forms of communication – encourage all forms of communication.
Texting is a major way teenagers communicate, but just like every form of communication, if they are taught the correct way to do so from the beginning, it may help to minimize any negative side effects.