Texting May Be Taking A Toll

The article "Texting May Be Taking A Toll" by Katie Hafner is about how texting is now affecting teenagers in their everyday life. The article says American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, almost 80 messages a day more than double the average of a year earlier.
  Sherry Turkle,a psychologist who is a director at Massachusetts Institute Technology says it might be causing a shift in adolescents develop."Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be," she said. "Texting hits directly at both those jobs." 
   Texting also leads to damage in people's thumbs. Peter W. Johnson, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, said " Based on our experiences with computer users, we know intensive repetitive use of the upper extremities can lead to musculoskeletal disorder, so we gave some reason to be concerned that too much texting could lead to temporary or permanent damage to the thumbs." 

Precipitous falls in grades are also problems from texting. Greg Hardesty, a reporter in Lake Forest, Calif., said that late last year his 13-year-old daughter, Reina, racked up 14,528 texts in one month.Her grades then began to fall precipitously. After her parents confiscated her phone, Reina's grades have since improved,and the phone is back in her hands but because of the down fall from having her phone the first time, her text messages where limited.

  I think that texting has its rights and wrongs. Teenagers texting is not always a bad thing, i think limiting texting for teens is not such as bad thing. I can admit that texting does keep teens from sleeping and concentrating. But one of my rights from texting is, one day when leaving school to go home i noticed that i left my packet in my locker, which meant if i didn't have my packet i couldn't do my English home work. So then I texted one of my friend's from school that had their packet to ask them could they give me the words off of the paper. She then called me and told me what each word was, with her telling me the words i could do my do my homework. If i didn't have a phone or didn't have anyway to contact her i would have gotten a 0 for my homework.
  A wrong for texting is lacking of sleep. Last week on Thursday i was up very late texting and on the phone and knew i had school the next day. But i decided to stay up, but i did eventually go to sleep. Getting up the next day for school was so hasty. I was very tired and sleepy, but i had to face the consequences of my actions from the night before and go to school. Yes, i was very tired in class but i fought my sleep and got my work done. But fighting my sleep gave me a headache, so when i got home i went straight to sleep. But if I didn't stay up the night before i would've avoided getting that headache and being to sleepy. 
  But like i stated before texting does have its rights and wrongs, but texting does not always have a bad outcome on teens.