How parents can handle teenagers' texting frenzy

If you have a teenager in your home, do you follow their texting patterns?

The sheer monthly volume of a texting teenager can drive nearly any parent to count the minutes until they leave home ... for good.

A recent survey shows all age groups are texting more than in previous years. And for teenagers between the ages of 13 to 17, texting takes up a major portion of their day.

The Nielsen Company found, in a 2010 survey, that the average teenager (13 to 17 years old) sends or receives 3,339 texts per month, a little more than 100 per day. Girls average a bit more, at 4,050, and boys a bit less, at 2,539.

Some local high school students shatter this average.

"Pretty sure 10,000 (a month)," said Mati Schwartzhoff, a sophomore at Cedar Rapids Kennedy.

"10,000, maybe? I send a lot," admitted Annie Feltes, Kennedy freshman.

From a parent's standpoint, trying to stay engaged in the activities of a teenager is a real battle. School lets out for the summer by late next week for most Eastern Iowa school districts. This will leave these teenagers with plenty of free time.

Capt. Steve O'Konek of the Cedar Rapids Police Department brought up this point during an April interview about the presence of drugs in the city. He said that, a generation ago before cell phones and texting became commonplace, parents could often hear half of a teenager's conversation. But now, teenagers can send just about any message without detection because of the silence of a text message.

How can a parent find the balance between following their children and being the overbearing parent?

"It represents the issues of control," said Wendy Stokesbary, a counselor at Family Psychology Associates in Cedar Rapids, and the mother of a teenage girl. "How much do parents get to know and how much does the teen get to assert themselves?"

Stokesbary said parents can find that ideal place by making sure to really speak with their teenager, whether at dinner time or driving in the car "with some actual eye contact happening".

Through the Internet, some sites claim to offer technology that can "spy" on a teenager's cell phone, even sending a copy of the content of a text message to parent's cell phone. Employees at four different cell phone stores said on Wednesday that finding out the numbers the texts go is easy, but that actually reading the content of the texts themselves requires a court order.