Todd Hollander Market Research

The latest bill from my wireless provider revealed that in a brief 30-day time span, one of my teenage daughters sent or received a total of 7,189 text messages. I did the math. It boggles the mind…

• This girl gets plenty of sleep — an average of 10 hours per night.
• Which leaves only 14 brief waking hours each day.
• But five days a week she spends 8 hours in school where cell phone use is very limited.
• Which leaves 52 waking non-school hours per week.
• Which means she is using 35 text messages every waking hour outside of the classroom.

I asked some of the girls on her high school tennis team if that seemed excessive. One of them replied, “That’s nothing. I once used 8,000 texts in 2 weeks - but I was sick.”

So what should we make of the teenage mania for text messaging? A few observations…

1. Teenagers today communicate in frequencies that are incomprehensible to their parents, most of whom would choose an ice pick in the eye over trading 35 text messages per hour.
2. Some teens spend most of their time multitasking, nearly always engaging in at least one text messaging dialog regardless of what else they may be doing.
3. This habit may lead to a new learning disability: Acquired Attention Deficit Disorder (AADD). If nature doesn’t give a kid ADD, their environment just might.
4. The communication methods preferred by my generation (voice-to-voice and email) are antiquated to our children. We’d better keep up or risk the inability to communicate with our offspring.
5. (Perhaps the most important lesson:) An unlimited text messaging plan can save a lot of money for parents of teenagers.