My allergy siege is over, thank you. I can breathe again. My eyes have stopped watering. Which means I can get back to work. And the first story I see today is…
Study Finds Teens Texting Compulsively!
They can’t stop, and it’s the girls more than the boys ( http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/compulsive-texting-takes-toll-on-teenagers/?src=twr ). Something like 12% of the teenaged girls in this study, which involved some 400 teens, are compulsive when it comes to texting. (It was only 3% of boys.) Compulsive as in “compulsive gambling”–they just can’t stop, even if it’s messing up their lives.
Now, be patient with me, I’ve never sent or received a text message in my life and have no plans to start now. In fact, I’m not so sure I know what texting is. Is it that stuff that goes like “i got 1 4 U,” or “lmao, mdf, C U at wankys 2morro”?
For this they lose sleep and get mad if you try to talk with them face-to-face? Granted, homework isn’t the most enticing of pursuits, and it’s never hard to distract kids from doing it–but you would think the texting would be just as boring as school homework.
Yo, folks, this is our culture! This is what we ask for, and this is what we get. We consign our children to institutions that teach them that their age-group peers are the most important people in the world, the only people who understand and care about them or find them at all interesting: and both parents work, all the time, that’s how the baby winds up in day care: and what the schools don’t teach ’em, Hollywood will–and we’re amazed they turn out like this?
I love teenagers. They’re fun! They have lively minds.
But when you marinate them for long enough in our schools and in our culture, they’re not fun anymore.
And let the text messages testify to the liveliness of their minds.