I was struggling a bit to make a solid point to my daughter the other day about texting. She’s in the process of transitioning from middle school to high school and, as is the case with nearly all of her peers, her phone is becoming an ever-bigger part of her life. (Truly, just like the mayor’s daughter says in the movie Horton Hears a Who!: Everyone in her class has a Who-Phone these days!) I was trying to warn her about the dangers that inherently come along with texting, especially sending and receiving pictures via text and/or social media platforms like Snapchat.
I don’t think I did a very good job. And over the next few days I kept feeling around for a firmer place to hammer in the rock-climbing piton, as it were. And that’s when one of my fine colleagues here at Plugged In passed along this little tidbit he’d found while doing research for a project he was working on. (He found the core of it at news.usc.edu.)
Is there a link between texting, sexting and sex among young adolescents? According to researchers from the University of Southern California, the answer is yes. They analyzed more than 1,300 responses to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior surveys filled out by middle school students in Los Angeles (between the ages of 10 and 15). The first correlation they discovered was that adolescents who sent more than 100 texts a day were more likely to sext and to be sexually active. Meanwhile, those who reported receiving sexts—texts with sexually imagery or messages—were six times more likely to report being sexually active.
Overall, 20% of students with text-capable cellphones said they had received sexts, while 5% reported sending them. Lead author Eric Rice, assistant professor at the USC School of Social Work, said of the findings, “Our results show that excessive, unlimited or unmonitored texting seems to enable sexting. Parents may wish to openly monitor their young teen’s cellphone, check in with them about who they are communicating with and perhaps restrict their number of texts allowed per month.”
There’s just something about sitting behind a phone screen in our bedrooms that seems to make us more willing to say or do or take pictures of things that we never would if we were sitting at Starbucks chatting face to face. But this isn’t just a phone thing. Long, long, long before dialogue went digital, Proverbs 10:19 gave us this sage advice: “Don’t talk too much, for it fosters sin. Be sensible and turn off the flow!”
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