Between their crazy schedules and upside-down circadian rhythms, teens always have been somewhat sleep-deprived. Now technology is making it worse. Teens are not just texting, instant-messaging and surfing Facebook all day; they’re sleeping with their cell phones or laptops, too. Or rather, not sleeping. And doctors and parents, many of them raised in an era when phones were attached to walls, are concerned. The average teen sends 2,899 text messages a month - that’s 97 a day. And, according to a new study conducted in Belgium, some 44% of those kids are waking up in the middle of the night to answer their phone or send a text. We explored the issue in depth in yesterday’s Times and Trib, talked to experts and kids, and pulled up some suggestions for how parents can help their kids - including a very simple and practical suggestion from San Jose psychologist David Marcus on how to help your teen see that life’s better when you’re not exhausted.
I have mixed feelings about TV Turnoff Week - and at first I thought it was just because it’s inadvisable to get between me and my Tivo’d episodes of “Lost.” But I’ve been reading Christy Matte’s blog post on the topic, and she just nails what I was feeling. OK, she says, we spend too much time staring at screens, but “this one week without any connectivity is supposed to make us healthier, smarter and more close to our families. I find the whole thing absurd.” TV Turn Off Week is like a “fad diet” that doesn’t differentiate between good and bad electronic amusements, and doesn’t provide any kind of long lasting effects. Instead, she suggests, “How about encouraging people to spend an hour more family time each week all year long? Or to spend another 45 minutes a week doing something fun outside?”
OK, the Topps baseball card company may not say its latest venture was inspired by Harry Potter, but those of us with a yen for chocolate frogs and the magical trading cards with moving wizard pics, will find the new 3-D baseball card concept a little familiar. But awesome, nonetheless. Topps, purveyor of traditional trading cards (like the one pictured to the left) for a zillion years, is introducing new “augmented reality” baseball cards today. Hold one up to a webcam and a 3-D avatar pops up on your laptop. Rotate the card and the baseball player rotates too. Topps’ chief digital officer Steve Grimes called it “the ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ version of a baseball card,” in his interview with the New York Times. And Louise Curcio, marketing veep at Topps competitor, Upper Deck, says her company is working on virtual cards that “come alive and contain video.”
OK, that’s cool. But we’d rather have one with Dumbledore.
Videotaping a birth is so old school. The hip new thing, apparently, is twittering - tweeting - through labor. Twitter, for those of you who don’t know, is a micro-blogging network where users send out quick little updates, just a few words to subscriber lists. Now, it’s entered the labor and delivery room.
MTV is reporting that Grammy Award-winning soul singer Erykah Badu and her rapper boyfriend, Jay Electronica, twittered every detail of their daughter’s birth on Sunday, from Badu’s first “Morning, I’m in labor” to Electronica’s awestruck “I see the head, full of hair.”
So now we’re curious. Very, very curious. Did you text through labor? Twitter? Set up a web cam?
Still looking for holiday gifts for the teen or teen-at-heart in your life? Our buddy Danny over at Gamester, the video game blog, just gave us a heads-up on some cool retro video game bundles that … OK, actually he was hinting around that he wants them for Christmas, but we figured video games that cost $9.98 each and don’t involve a trip to the mall might appeal to other people too! Our video game expertise doesn’t stray much beyond “Rock Band,” but Danny’s got the lowdown on all the latest titles, in case you need other ideas too.
This should be chilling news for any teen. According to Kaplan, the test prep folks, one in ten college admissions officers check out their applicants’ Facebook and MySpace pages as part of their applicant vetting process. And some 38 percent found information that reflected poorly on the applicant. It wasn’t necessarily because they’d posted pictures from the teen kegger, either. In one case, an applicant bragged about having aced his application, even though he didn’t want to go to that school. So the school didn’t put him in that situation - they rejected him first.
Your thoughts? Punch a button on the poll or click “comments” and share.
Thinking about going on Facebook to keep in touch with your older teens and college kids? Tread carefully, say experts and teens. With parents flocking to Facebook in ever-increasing numbers, teens and college kids - most of whom are savvy about Internet safety and have been on Facebook long enough to feel that it is “their” playground not yours - are eyeballing these interlopers with some trepidation. Are you there to spy? Are you going to friend their friends? Or - horrors! - poke them?
So here’s a quick guide to Facebook etiquette for parents, courtesy of teens, college kids and wise parents and grandparents: Read the rest of this entry »
We are just reeling over something our buddy Danny at Gamester discovered this morning. According to a survey by the family-centric game site What They Play, parents are more concerned about their older teens playing “Grand Theft Auto,” than about their exposure to booze, violence or porn. Ahem. Supposedly, the poll results “demonstrate that parents are as apprehensive about their children’s media diets as they are about traditional social issues such as alcohol, drugs, violence and sex.” Um, no. No, it doesn’t. It demonstrates that parents are nuts. Read Danny’s hilarious take, then click “comments” and tell us: What would you worry about most at a 17-year-old’s slumber party? Kids watching porn, smoking dope, drinking beer or playing Grand Theft Auto?
Well, we knew it was bound to happen. Medical experts in Wales are warning that teens who text, i.e., all teens, are at risk for repetitive stress injuries from cell phone use. A new survey in that country found that 16 percent of texters had symptoms of TMI, which stands for Text Message Injury, not Too Much Information. Excessive texting, they said, can cause thumb and wrist tendons to swell, causing pain that may spread, in the most extreme cases, all the way up the arms and into the shoulders and neck area.
The solution? You know how us grown-ups are forever griping about text message abbreviations? LOL, OMG, LMAO and other little phrase condensations? Doctors say those are good. Very good. They shorten the amount of time you or your teen spend thumbing the teeny tiny buttons on cell phones.
Their other suggestion was terrible: bigger cell phones. Like, OMG.
But we found this part charming: when it comes to sharing good news, teens were most likely to text their moms first.
Nintendo librarians? A video game pavilion at the American Library Association conference? A million-dollar grant to “develop a national model for library gaming”?? Quick, someone check for locusts and plagues! Who’d have thought the ALA, that bastion of literacy, would ever promote video games?
“Libraries are adapting to new technology,” ALA President Loriene Roy told the Chicago Tribune in a story that ran yesterday. “It’s in the nature of the library to offer a wide range of material. It’s not the end of change for libraries.”
Nintendo’s just as surprised as we are. And that video game booth at the ALA convention wasn’t some fluke either. A Syracuse University survey of public libraries last year found that 80 percent had video games on their library computers. Some 40 percent held actual video game events and 13 percent had Nintendo and Xbox. The surprising news? Nearly 75 percent of the video game devotees came back to check out a book.
So what do you think? Death of literacy? Publicity stunt? Cool way to bring new audiences into book-lined libraries? Click “comments” and weigh in.
Between their crazy schedules and upside-down circadian rhythms, teens always have been somewhat sleep-deprived. Now technology is making it worse. Teens are not just texting, instant-messaging and surfing Facebook all day; they’re sleeping with their cell phones or laptops, too. Or rather, not sleeping. And doctors and parents, many of them raised in an era when phones were attached to walls, are concerned. The average teen sends 2,899 text messages a month - that’s 97 a day. And, according to a new study conducted in Belgium, some 44% of those kids are waking up in the middle of the night to answer their phone or send a text. We explored the issue in depth in yesterday’s Times and Trib, talked to experts and kids, and pulled up some suggestions for how parents can help their kids - including a very simple and practical suggestion from San Jose psychologist David Marcus on how to help your teen see that life’s better when you’re not exhausted. 
