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 the unlimited texting plans offered by many carriers, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Co. — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.
Maima Kamara, 16, and Laporsha Thomas, 15, both sophomores at St. Petersburg's Gibbs High, have unlimited texting on their plans and say they easily exceed the Nielsen averages.
What do their parents think? "As long as I listen to them when they talk," said Laporsha, "and I keep my grades up, everything is okay."
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.
In Tampa, it also recently led to the case of the Freedom High School senior who rear-ended a police cruiser as she was texting.
And it's a big issue at schools in the Tampa Bay area and around the country, as teachers catch kids texting during class and administrators face parents who don't want their children separated from their electronic umbilical cords.
Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.
"Then you hear that these kids are responding to texts late at night,'' he said. "That's going to cause sleep issues in an age group that's already plagued with sleep issues."
Developmental issues for teens
The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 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, Turkle continued, "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 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."
A double-edged sword
Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., 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 can be an enormous tool," he said. "It offers companionship and the promise of connectedness. At the same time, texting can make a youngster feel frightened and overly exposed."
Texting may also be taking a toll on teenagers' thumbs. Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, said it's too soon to know if this stress is damaging, but he wouldn't be surprised if it is. "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."
Connecting from the classroom
Most schools forbid cell phone use in class, but many kids are adept at texting while hiding the phone under a desk or in a bag.
"I can't tell when it's happening, and there's nothing we can do about it," said Deborah Yager, a high school chemistry teacher in Castro Valley, Calif. who gave an anonymous survey to 50 kids, most of whom admitted texting during class.
Joffe says parents tend to be far less aware of texting than of, say, video game playing or general computer use, and the unlimited plans often mean that parents stop paying attention to billing details. "I talk to parents in the office now," he said. "I'm quizzing them, and no one is thinking about this."
Times photojournalist Cherie Diez contributed to this report.
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