Mar 31st, 2009
Children and Texting
Do you allow your kids to send text messages from their cell phone? Or do worries of bullying and other safety issues have you block that service from their cell phone? Debbe Geiger, mother to a 14 and 11 year old, writes an impassioned piece for the New York Times about why she and her husband do not allow their children to send text messages.
When the phone bill listed more than 3,000 texts in one month, we told her it was time to chill out. Granted, we had unlimited messaging so it wasn’t costing us any more. But does that make it O.K. to send an average of 100 messages a day via text? What could she possibly say in those sentence fragments and abbreviations that was so crucial? And what exactly was she talking about?
As it turned out, it was what other people were saying to her that began to concern me more. That’s when I learned about the mean-girl texts, the ones no one would have the nerve to say to a person’s face but are easy to send from one nonconfrontational phone to another. “We all hate you,” I saw on the tiny black screen one night when I picked her up from religion class. First it tore my heart out. Then I got annoyed. Why was she texting during religion class?