The thing about texting

…is it's asynchronous, teens will tell you. When they're on the fly and don't want to talk to somebody because that could suck up sooo much time - but there's something brief they *have* to tell that person - they'll text. That's what 16-year-old Cybil told the Sacramento Bee, in a story that starts out being about the jaw-dropping cost of teen texting to parents not yet familiar with its attractions to teenagers. So, as with phone bills for parents, ironically, texting is all about control and predictability for teens. They can control the length of the connection when they're busy - they don't get sucked into the black hole of a phone conversation. As for parents' control over phone bills? Well, there's the prepaid option, so that when the communicator runs out of minutes and text messages paid for upfront, that's it. Parents can actually budget for that amount. The other option, which I looked for but didn't see in the article, is not allowing texting. I asked my service (Verizon) to turn off texting on our family plan, so we don't have to pay the $.02 for every incoming message, the $.10 for every outgoing one, or the $7-10-or-so/month for unlimited texting. Something to look into, anyway. [See also "The appeal of text to teens."]