Digital Parenting and Safety Blog

In December at an FCC conference in Washington, D.C., the LG Text Education program got recent attention. So I thought I’d check it out.

Usually I’m dubious about corporate-sponsored campaigns that are supposedly for the “public good.” After all, LG is a mobile phone manufacturer and their motivation is to sell their products and services, not protect our kids’ best interests.

But in this case, I’m pretty impressed. The focus of the year-old LG Text Education program is to educate parents about what is going on with their kids, digitally speaking.
Of it’s mission, LG says that “by becoming more informed through the LG Text Ed program, we all can enjoy the benefits of this new connectedness in a positive and safe way.”

LG draws from a council of credentialed child behavioral experts and uses charismatic actress/comedian Jane Lynch as its spokesman. The text ed program provides a balanced look at the risks posed by texting and how it fits into modern family life.

The program is not about how to react to the texting phenomenon affecting teens, but about understanding texting from the inside out and approaching it as an informed parent – the ultimate goal, in my opinion, being parental rules that are influenced by knowledge rather than fear of the unknown.

Above all, parents are encouraged to text with their kids and be educated about text acronyms, sexting, mobile bullying, excessive texting, text rage, and texting while driving. There’s no better parent than an informed parent to make rules, judgments, and decisions about their tween or teen’s texting habits.

Jenny Evans is a mother of three and a freelance writer specializing in parenting, childhood, and family issues.

Around 50% of teens admit to texting while driving, and that’s a really scary thought for parents who have a new driver in the house.

Teens are already the riskiest class of drivers. They are inexperienced, exhibit slower reaction times, and often aren’t paying attention to much other than the car in front of them. Teens also think they are invincible, not imagining that unsafe behavior can hurt them or someone else.

Add texting into the mix, and it’s a deadly combination. Texting while driving is even more dangerous than drinking while driving – yet many teens who would never drive drunk are occasionally or regularly texting behind the wheel.

It’s vital that your teen understands the true risks of texting while driving when the big 1-6 arrives. Consider drawing up a contract where your teen pledges not to use their cell phone while driving, under penalty of getting their driving privileges revoked by you.

Also important: be a good role model. Adults regularly text and drive, too. Don’t be one of them. Teach kids – both by word and by example – to put their phone in an inaccessible place while driving and to practice saying “Can you get that?” to a passenger in the car when they receive a text they’re just dying to read.

When your teen is distracted by reading or sending a text, he or she is much more likely to make a deadly mistake like running a red light or drifting over the center line. Any text your teen could possibly read or type is not worth putting their own life (and the lives of everyone else on the road) on the line.

Consider watching this video from AT&T with your kids to start the conversation about texting while driving:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DebhWD6ljZs

Jenny Evans is a mother of three and a freelance writer specializing in parenting, childhood, and family issues.

Does your teen have to check her phone the second a text comes in, no matter what she’s doing? Does texting regularly interrupt mealtime and homework time? Does it seem like your teen is constantly “on call”? If so, have you considered the impact texting may be having on her sleep?

Night Texting and Sleep Requirements

Healthy teenagers actually need more sleep than elementary school children: about 9.5 hours per night. But for teens struggling with a texting addiction, getting adequate sleep at night may be a serious challenge.

Your teen’s obsession with checking texts the second they are received doesn’t turn off after lights-out, and plenty of their friends are still awake texting them after hours.

Signs of Sleep Deprivation

Sleep-deprived teens may become listless, moody, or irritable. They may have trouble staying awake all day, begin failing in school, or complain of headaches or feeling physically weak. You may also notice physical changes, such as dark undereye circles and yawning.

Long-Term Consequences of Sleep Deprivation

The effects of prolonged sleep deprivation range from general crankiness to migraines and more serious health problems such as type II diabetes and hypertension.

Inadequate sleep also makes for dangerous drivers and poor report cards.

What to Do About a Night Texting Addiction

If you suspect that your teen is texting all night at the expense of a good night’s sleep, take a look at the phone bill. It will show the time of each text, so you’ll know whether they’re texting when they’re supposed to be sleeping.

The biggest thing parents can do to help their kids get some sleep is to remove the phone from their bedroom at night. Keep it downstairs and turned off, or keep it in your room. Your kids are sure to dislike the new rule, but they’ll get used to it.

Your kids didn’t like it when they were toddlers and they probably won’t like it now, but parents need to set limits. If a child’s late-night texting is having an ill effect on them, then putting an end to it is in their best interest.

Jenny Evans is a mother of three and a freelance writer specializing in parenting, childhood, and family issues.

Things were sure different when we were kids. If we needed to call mom and dad away from home, we had to find a pay phone. But cell phones are becoming more and more common with our kids, even among those as young as 6 years old.

Kids and Mobile Phones

In 2008, 51% of 12-year-olds owned cell phones, up from 18% in 2004. Among tween mobile phone owners, the average age of receiving the first phone is 10 or 11.

Parents are ostensibly providing their kids with cell phones so that they can keep tabs on them, stay connected, and make sure their kids always have access to help when they need it. But what is a 7-year-old doing with his phone, anyway?

The good news is that the cell phone is indeed a valuable tool in keeping kids in touch with their parents and out of trouble. The most common use of the cell phone for kids in the 6-12 age range is calling their parents, followed by calling friends, emergency purposes, text messages, and gaming.

Giving the First Cell Phone

Evaluate your child’s readiness for mobile phone responsibility and do your homework before buying his first cell phone.

Many phone manufacturers are now producing kid-friendly phones geared toward the 6-12 age bracket: some only allow calls to numbers pre-programmed by mom and dad, others block texting capabilities and internet connectivity.

When you finally make the purchase and hand over the cell phone, don’t do it without a contract. Sit down with your child and outline your expectations for use of his phone. Draw up a list of rules and the consequences for breaking them. Make it clear that having a cell phone is a privilege, not a right. If you are not providing a phone designed specifically for children, your it is best to then skip right past the "feature phone" and go straight to the "smart phone" such as a Blackberry or Google Android device. Smart phones are able to support the use of monitoring software such as the service we provide. Feature phones typically allow all of the functionality that can get kids in trouble but they don't allow robust monitoring tools.

Cell phones can be invaluable tools to keep your kids safe in today’s increasingly dangerous world, but only if you also provide them with the information they need to use their cell phone responsibly.

We know that tweens and teens are really, really good at texting. Texting while walking, texting discreetly in class, carrying on multiple text conversations at once. But is there a difference among kids in who texts the most?

Turns out that it’s no coincidence that both the winners and half-dozen finalists in the 2009 and 2010 LG Texting Championships have been female. Girls do the bulk of the texting the majority of the time, specifically teenage girls.

Girls are, first of all, more likely than boys to own a cell phone. The Pew Forum reports that 77% of girls 13-18 have cell phones, versus 74% of boys. (I’m wondering if that’s because more girls buy or request them, or because parents are more worried about their daughters than their sons in general.)

For kids who own mobile phones and use them to text, the incidence of texting increases with age but also with gender. Older girls are the most active: 14 to 17 year old girls report sending and receiving 100 text messages a day.

Why are girls particularly drawn to texting? It’s probably because females are more relationship-oriented and more apt to communicate with their friends using whatever medium is most easily available to them: in this case, the text message.

Remember those days before cell phones, when teen girls across America were hounded by their parents every evening to stop tying up the landline talking to their friends for hours? Those were the days.

Jenny Evans is a mother of three and a freelance writer specializing in parenting, childhood, and family issues.

Putting the family computer in a well-trafficked, central location of the house has always been one of the first lines of defense for parents who want to keep their kids safe online. But monitoring kids' online life is harder for parents in this decade because of Internet-enabled cell phones.

The traditional computer still appears to be the method of choice for going online (probably because of the bigger screen and the easy-to-maneuver computer mouse), but the cell phone is catching up fast.

How many teens use their phones to connect to the Internet? I’ve seen numbers as low as 21%, as high as 27%. Essentially, 1 in 4 kids do.

What are they doing online with their phones? Here’s a breakdown from the Pew Internet Forum:

• 88% are texting

• 83% are taking pictures

• 64% are sharing pictures

• 60% are playing music

• 54% are recording video

• 47% are playing games

• 32% are exchanging video

• 31% are instant messaging

• 27% are browsing the Internet

• 23% are social networking

• 21% are emailing

• 11% are shopping

Many of these used to be computer-exclusive activities, but they’re starting to be done on mobile phones, too. A great deal of today’s online communication with friends, photo and video sharing, and gaming is now done through the medium of the almighty cell phone.

The computer is still the dominant online device for most teens, particularly those in higher economic groups (presumably because of the cost of a computer in the house), but it’s no longer the only one.

When talking about your kids’ Internet use, include their mobile phone in the conversation. And when monitoring their online activity, don’t overlook the tiny mobile phone in their pocket.

Do you know how much texting and social networking your teen is doing? You may want to sit up and play closer attention to how your child communicates online – not just looking for “red flags,” but at the overall amount of time they spend doing it.

Researchers from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine found that excessive texters and social networkers were more likely to drink, do drugs, and be sexually active.

According to the study, teens who sent more than 120 texts per school day were:

• 3.5 times more likely to have had sex

• 90% more likely to report four or more sexual partners

• twice as likely to have tried alcohol

• 55% more likely to have been in a physical fight

• 43% more likely to be binge drinkers

• 41% more likely to have used illicit drugs

• 40% more likely to have tried cigarettes

Teens who spent more than 3 hours per school day on social networking sites were:

• 94% more likely to have been in a physical fight

• 84% more likely to have used illicit drugs

• 79% more likely to have tried alcohol

• 69% more likely to be binge drinkers

• 69% more likely to have had sex

• 62% more likely to have tried cigarettes

• 60% more likely to report four or more sexual partners

Nobody is suggesting that you make your kids stop texting and social networking altogether – in fact, it would be a little silly to insist that texting causes binge drinking or fighting. But it does suggest that there is a correlation between the amount of time teens are left to their own (electronic) devices and the risky behaviors they engage in.

Just one more thing to think about when you discuss limits on texting and Internet use with your kids.

Understanding, how one's children are using technology is an important part of raising digital children today.  Studies show that most parents would be surprised by how their children use technology compared to how they think their children use technology.  Monitoring services are now an important part of the modern parenting toolbox.  Our service is an online and mobile service which helps parents protect their children from bullies and predators and helps them to manage their kids' privacy and reputation online.  The service also helps parents understand how their kids are using social networking sites and their mobile phone and provides clarity into what is going on within their digital worlds.

Jenny Evans is a mother of three and a freelance writer specializing in parenting, childhood, and family issues.

Are you concerned that your child’s thumbs might fall off as a result of sending too many text messages?  Well join the club. If your home is anything like mine than you’re seeing the number of text messages being sent and received by your child head steadily upwards.  The average American teen now sends or receives one text message every nine minutes!

Text messaging is no longer just another way to connect with one another; it has become a cultural phenomenon.  Parodies on television of teens and tweens texting to one another while in the same room are funny because we can all imagine our own children doing the same thing. We’re asked to text in our vote to American Idol.  Barak Obama won the White House, in part, because of his team’s ability to engage young voters via text messaging.  The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently confirmed what every parent with a teenager already knows – texting has become the preferred channel of basic communication between teens and tweens and their friends.

Text messaging, officially called Short Message Service (SMS), has grown in popularity with teens for three primary reasons:

1. Texting is a more efficient and a faster way to communicate than a voice phone call,

1. The cost of messaging plans has steadily declined,

1. Sending a text message is similar to passing a note in class – it is a discreet method of communicating with friends.

For parents and educators, it is this last statement that represents a challenge.  Let’s start with the obvious.  Why did we pass notes in class when we were kids?  If we’re being honest with ourselves than we can acknowledge that we were communicating something that we either didn’t want others to hear or we shouldn’t have been communicating at that particular moment at all.  Passing notes in class was our attempt at convert communications.

Text messaging has many benefits, it is here to stay and most text messages our children send or receive represent perfecting acceptable content.  I have nothing against text messaging.  That said, this chart illustrates, a staggering percentage of our children admit to using text messaging inappropriately.



Perhaps even more alarming is what Local, State and Federal law enforcement is seeing as a skyrocketing trend.  Child predators are now increasingly using text messaging to communicate directly with our children often right under our noses. Predators are always going to go where the children are and the preferred method of communication by kids is text messaging.

Risks and threats to our kids’ well-being have been a part of life since the beginning of time.  But it is important for us to accept a very simple truth – texting messaging and kids can be a risky combination without active parental involvement.

Introduction to Text Lingo

While the smart phones are capable of sending long text messages, less advanced mobile phones can only accommodate messages of 160 characters. This limitation naturally led users to try to use the fewest number of characters possible to convey a comprehensible message.

To cut the character count of a text message, users often use abbreviations and ignore punctuation and traditional grammar. For words which have no common abbreviation, users commonly remove the vowels from a word, or use pictures or a single letter or number to represent whole words.  Eventually entire phrases were reduced to acronyms.  Today, text lingo (also known as SMS language, Textese, chatspeak, chat lingo or net lingo) is a commonly used and well understood language by most teens and, to a lesser degree, technology-savvy adults.

Most of us are familiar with the regular, more harmless codes like LOL (laughing out loud) and ttyl (talk to you later) and a few others here and there. But as I said, text lingo is an entire language and most parents don’t speak text lingo fluently.  This opens the door to much risk but understanding the risk is the first step in managing it.  Allow me to share a sample conversion with you:



Surprised?  Stunned?  As this conversation illustrates, text lingo is not only more efficient than writing out entire messages, it also makes it possible for some pretty troublesome conversations to take place right under our nose.  Kids and child predators alike are able to engage in conversations that few parents would be able to understand.  Text lingo has become so mainstream with kids that it is now used in email, on social networking websites and when chatting with instant messaging services like AIM® and Yahoo Messanger®.

Talking to Kids in a Language We All Understand

Whether we’re talking about text lingo, the traditional written word or picture our kids put online, the best tool at your disposal to decrease risky behavior is your active involvement.  The earlier we start talking to our children about the decisions they make online and with their mobile phone the better.  Our children need to understand what our expectations are and what we consider “out of bounds”.  Most children, teens included, say that their parents are the strongest influencers over the decisions they make.  Just because we don’t speak in text lingo doesn’t mean that we cannot talk to our child about using the language appropriately.

Text messaging and text lingo are going to be a part of our kids’ life long into the future just like social networking, having a bank account, using a credit card, driving a car, etc. With consistent guidance on text messaging and text lingo from mom and dad, you have every reason to expect that mistakes will be less frequent and less severe.

This post originally appeared on www.timwoda.com

Tim Woda is a passionate advocate for protecting children from today’s scariest digital dangers – cyberbullying, sexting and predators.