Jorge Werthein

Encouraging the Text Generation

to Rediscover Its Voice

By SUSAN DOMINUS

Published: April 26, 2010

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Julia Sokoloff, 14, woke up around 8 on Sunday morning and reached for her phone the way hard-core smokers reach for their cigarettes, before they’re even fully conscious. She sent a text, something about a play rehearsal, and then it hit her.

Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

Alexandra Steel, a science teacher, talked Monday about the no-texting experiment at Riverdale Country School.

“Noooo!” she screamed, then ran into her little brother Gabriel’s room and threw the phone at him: “Take it!”

It was the first hour of the first day of a two-day experiment in text-free living at Riverdale Country School, where Julia is an eighth grader, and already she had fallen off the wagon, simply by forgetting.

If only every supposedly responsible grown-up who was tempted to text and drive had an 11-year-old Gabriel in the back seat, someone with an iron grip and a long-unsatisfied desire to play the enforcer. (A few hours later, when Julia asked for the phone back, he told her: No can do.)

Last week, researchers at the University of Maryland reported that college students who swore off social media showed signs of withdrawal similar to those of drug addicts going cold turkey. So how would scores of middle-schoolers fare under the same circumstances, what with their underdeveloped frontal lobes and raging need for affirmation?

By midday Monday, three-quarters of the way through the experiment at Riverdale, an elite private school in the Bronx, a handful of students gathered to discuss how it felt. None looked pale and ashen; none were twitching, at least visibly.

The school counselor, K C Cohen, had distributed worksheets to the group beforehand that asked, among other things: When you find yourself wanting to text/I.M./chat, is it because you need to communicate with someone right away? Or just for the sake of a casual connection?

“WANT TO!” Zachary Riopelle, a 13-year-old seventh grader answered. He underlined it, too.

The experiment, which asked students to voluntarily forsake instant messaging, chat, texts, and Facebook through Monday night, was Ms. Cohen’s idea. “Are they finding easy ways to avoid negotiating some of the normal social challenges of adolescence?” she wrote in an explanatory e-mail message that the head of school sent to parents.

The immediacy of parent-child texting does wonders for communication, Ms. Cohen said in an interview, but some aspects of the constant electronic dialogue make her uneasy. “Kids will do poorly on a test, and more often than not, right away they’ll go into the bathroom and text their mom and dad,” she said. “There’s no sense that the kid just has to feel his feelings. It’s an instant Band-Aid.”

The experiment left Kayla Waterman, a 12-year-old sixth grader, with a new appreciation for the convenience of texting over calling. On Monday morning, instead of texting, she called her mom to let her know there were “a gazillion fire trucks at school.” Then she called right back: false alarm — fire drill. “I could tell she was getting annoyed because I kept calling,” Kayla said. How many times during the school day does she usually text her mom? About 10, Kayla said; a friend nodded in agreement.

Boundaries between work and home have long since fallen, so maybe it should not be surprising that the same is true for school and home. But what middle school student 20 years ago would have voluntarily reached out to her mother 10 times between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.? If school had any universally agreed upon upside, it was that it gave a 12-year-old some much-needed space to revel in independence or struggle with rejection — space in which, presumably, that 12-year-old could start to figure out who she was, or how he wanted to navigate the world.

This text-free Sunday, the Riverdale students said, was unusually relaxing. They were shocked at how quickly they finished their homework, undistracted by an always-open video chat, or checking in on Facebook or responding to the hundred messages they typically get in a day. Kayla and her mother went for a stroll in SoHo, a rare outing, with them both off the computer. “I had to look for things to do,” said Zachary, who ended up watching a movie with his mother.

Fewer than half of the 250 middle school students at Riverdale participated in the experiment, but Julia, for one, found it valuable. Among the revelations was the envious reaction of her father, who pointed at his own BlackBerry and told her, “I’d give anything to put this down.”

Unlike him, she realized, she had a choice, the best youth has to offer: freedom.