Texting Leads to Babies?

I'm not one for shocking with statistics, but some statistics simply beg our attention, and this is one of them:

According to a study revealed just this week, teens who text more than 120 times a day are more likely to have had sex and used drugs or alcohol than those who don't.

While researchers stopped short of claiming that "hyper-texting" leads to these behaviors, they say that the link between the two is "startling" and deserves our attention. The researchers' conclusion led them to point toward two common denominators between the teens who texted with such frequency and engaged in risky behaviors - (1) extra sensitivity toward peer pressure, and (2) permissive or absent parents.

Few of us would consider ourselves to be "permissive or absent parents," but the following questions might be worth asking:

1) Do I even KNOW how many texts my child sends and receives a day?

2) Does my child spend more "home time" communicating with peers than parents?

3) Am I modeling and teaching how to act responsibly with a cell phone - boundaries, limits, etc.?

As a footnote, allow me to offer some encouraging advice that comes straight from the mouths and lives of our teens - fasting from (or turning off) the cell phone is a life-giving practice. Try to get a teen to turn off and put away their phones seems like asking them to hold their breath at times - a nice challenge for 30 seconds, but impossible for much longer! But many of our teens, some voluntarily and others by "force" (such as mission trips in the mountains of KY!), have reported again and again how liberating and even peace-making it was to not be tethered to their phones. Perhaps you can institute "Family Fasting Hours" (or even days, if you're brave!) where everyone in your family turns their phones OFF (not on silent!).

Now that's a Sabbath practice we could all benefit from.