Published in the Democrat and Chronicle on April 14th, 2010.
Would you let your child go to school intoxicated? Of course not. So why do we allow them to text while they are in school? Several recent studies have found that individuals who text while driving show the same driving impairments as individuals who drive while intoxicated.
Of course, teens do even worse than adults in these studies. One recent study placed experienced texters in a driving simulator and found that they were six times more likely to crash than their non-texting peers. If texting impairs driving performance, it will also impair learning.
Texting also causes constant disruption in the classroom. Many teachers tell me that they spend a great deal of their teaching time dealing with cell phone and texting issues in the classroom.
So you say, “My child doesn’t text in school.” I’m betting your child probably does. It’s easy enough to find out – just look at your phone records. Most phone companies will provide you a detailed listing of when texts were sent. If they were made between 8 and 3, your child was texting in school.
While you’re looking at those records, also look at when those texts ended during the day. We know preteens and teens need a good 10 to 12 hours of sleep a night. If texts at midnight or 1 a.m. occur on a regular basis, your child is coming to school with a sleep deficit that will also impair learning.
Parents are not always aware of the extent of the problem. In many schools, if a child is caught texting, the teacher will take the cell phone away but then give it back at the end of class. The parents never even know that it was a problem.
In fact, many parents actually text their children when they are at school. Children and teens are not adults, however. The social world in middle school and high school is much more intense than most workplace settings. A text a child receives while in class can disrupt his or her learning for the rest of that period and beyond. So help your child learn and their teachers teach, and strictly limit cell phone use during the school day.