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Do They Have a Merit Badge for Texting Yet?

by Lenore Skenazy (Subscribe to Lenore Skenazy's posts)
Feb 2nd 2010 11:00AM

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Filed under: Opinions


This weekend my kids, ages 11 and 13, are heading off to their annual Boy Scout ski trip, about three hours from home. They're taking clean shirts, socks, undies -- none of which I'm sure they'll unpack -- and a bunch of stuff I'm sure they will:

My older son is packing his iPod Touch (bought with his own money) and a special battery to keep it running three times as long. "Why do you need it?" I ask. "You'll be with your friends! You'll talk!"

"Mom," he rolls his eyes. "It's a long drive."

Younger son packs his cell phone and MP3 player. "But you love the Boy Scouts!" says I, the lady so old she remembers playing the license plate game on highway trips. "If you're listening to your music or texting someone else, you won't be listening to the conversation."

"But mom, I heard that the conversation gets boring after a while."

"Oh, I'm also bringing these," older son breaks in, brandishing a couple of DVDs. "For at night."
Naturally, I had imagined them spending the night telling ghost stories. Or talking the old fashioned way -- with their mouths. Or dropping fast asleep because they had so much fun in the snow. Now I'm wondering if they'll notice the snow at all.

The average 8 to 18-year-old spends seven and a half hours a day consuming media, a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation find. And since so often kids are doing two things at once (texting while watching TV, say) they actually manage to cram 11 hours' worth of content into that time. Multitasking? Sounds more like binge drinking to me. Except instead of beer, they're binging on pixels and links and LOLcats!

I was working myself into a digital age lather when I got hold of Anne Collier, co-director of the internet think tank ConnectSafely.org. "Anne!" I demanded. "What would you do if your boys were about to spend their Boy Scout weekend (or at least the car ride) totally plugged in?"

"Well," said the Utah mom of two, "if their friends are messing around with phones all the way, I wouldn't want my kid to be just twiddling his thumbs."

Really?! It's not the end of the world?

Not at all, she said, for this reason: The Kaiser study talks about kids "consuming" media. But that's what WE did when WE were kids, watching "old media." Kids on today's electronics aren't just sitting there. They're writing notes, sharing info, taking pictures, playing games. All of which sounds just like...

Boy Scouts.

A Boy Scout weekend in 2010 won't look exactly like one from 1950, or even 1990. But there will be boys and they'll be goofing around one way or another, and chances are they'll come home tired and happy. With a backpack full of clean underwear.

Related: More Families Stay in Touch Via Cell Phones, Texts

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