Parents: Notice a spike in your cell phone bill?

In a survey conducted by Disney Mobile, kids between the ages of 10 and 17 are on the phone an hour more per day than when school is in session — 3 hours and 45 minutes. Think about all you get done on a typical work day in 3 hours and 45 minutes. That’s how long some of these kids are using their phones. Do you even want to know what that adds up to in a month? Don’t say we didn’t warn you: 112.5 hours. You can breath just a bit easier, because this isn’t solely talk time; can you imagine your bill if it was? Rather, it’s talk, texting, and gaming. In our estimation, these numbers are kinda skewed. Ages 10 to 17 is way too broad a range. If the average time using a phone is 3 hours and 45 minutes, then 10-year-olds are bringing the average down, and 17-year-olds are bringing it waaaay up. The average 17-year-old might spend 200 hours per month on his or her phone — maybe even 250. Another statistic that kinda shocks us, mainly because we didn’t have a cell phone in high school: 58 percent of kids text message during class. Pardon us, but are their teachers stupid or something? How can you not detect a kid tapping away at a phone keyboard while you’re teaching them? This, to us, says more about the educational system than about kids and cell phones, but that’s a topic for another day in another forum. Kids are also texting more than they talk, which we totally understand, because we do too. Seriously, text messaging is such an easy medium of communication. You send your message, you’re done. No extras, no gabbing — it’s just straight to the point. It also comes in handy to lament our favorite sports team losing again, but that is also a topic for another day. We want to end this on as high a note as possible, because this has us kind of depressed. So let’s quote the story’s author, Dory Devlin:

We’ve started out with a pay-as-you-go plan for our teen because I think it’s a good idea for teens to see what it costs to use a cell phone and to think about how they use it instead of taking an expensive privilege for granted.

See? There are responsible parents out there. We’re much relieved. [Yahoo! Tech]]]>