Social Impact: Teens Text Messaging Friends Into the Wee Hours

The teen under the sheets used to be reading a book with a flashlight. Now she's text-messaging a boyfriend at 1 a.m.

Teens are famously sleep-deprived already, but experts say some are compounding the problem by staying up into the middle of the night to silently type messages to friends on their cellphones. The tiny phones -- with increasingly sophisticated capabilities -- are supplanting late-night computer messaging and making it even more difficult for parents to know when kids are really asleep.

"All this technology just enables teens to be connected 24/7," said Anastasia Goodstein, the San Francisco-based author of "Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online," published last month. "And it's literally 24/7."

Nearly a quarter of teens in a relationship have communicated with a boyfriend or girlfriend hourly between midnight and 5 a.m. via cellphone or texting, according to a recent online survey by Teenage Research Unlimited. One in six communicated 10 or more times an hour through the night.

"Is text-messaging contributing to sleep deprivation? Yes," said Dr. Cora Collette Breuner, a professor of adolescent medicine at the University of Washington.

"Most kids go to sleep with their phone plugged in right by their heads," said Breuner, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital and Medical Center and mom to a teenage son. Every ping of an incoming message is a temptation to pick up the phone. "They know talking on the phone might wake up their parents, but if they text, it probably won't."

With changing biorhythms, teens do naturally stay up later -- but not that late, sleep experts say. "Some teens perpetuate it with things they do," said Dr. Preetam Bandla, clinical director of pediatric sleep medicine at Swedish Medical Center's sleep institute. Like surfing the Internet or watching TV, text-messaging tends to energize teens rather than help them fall asleep.

"Once you start a conversation with friends, you want to keep it going," Bandla said. Parents who find a teen text-messaging at 3 a.m. can probably assume their kid has been up the whole time, he noted.

"It's way more fun than sleeping," Breuner said. "How exciting: Everybody else is asleep, and nobody knows you're getting away with stuff."

In one Edmonds, Wash., home, three teenage boys "armed with cellphones and good looks" used text-messaging to set up an early morning rendezvous, sneaking out of the house to meet girls. "I solved the issue by telling our sons that after midnight, the older boys' curfew, the phone should be off and that I would be checking the phone bill to see if there was any late-night activity," said one mom, who asked to remain anonymous. "If there was a violation, the phone would be taken away. So far, two years later, the rule has been respected."

For teens busy with after-school activities, jobs and homework, after-hours might be the only time they can check in with friends. But pushing bedtime even a little can add up. "That's precious time," Breuner said. "Twenty minutes can be eaten up by a text message. That's money in the bank just trickling out when they do that."

From 10 p.m. to midnight, almost a third of teens in a relationship call or text 10 to 30 times an hour, Teenage Research Unlimited found.

"We encourage parents to be aware when, where and how teens use their cellphones," said Jayne Wallace, spokeswoman for Virgin Mobile USA. "Texting can be surreptitious."

More than nine of 10 teens with cellphones have text-messaging capability, Wallace said. Two-thirds use text-messaging daily.

More than half of Virgin's customers ages 15 to 20 send or receive at least 11 text messages a day, she said. Nearly a fifth text 21 times a day or more. Some choose particular songs to play when they receive text