Remember the stereotype of the teenage girl being constantly on the phone with her friends? Or the fear that you might have had once that giving a teenager a cell phone would mean having all of the talk minutes on your cell plan go up in smoke? You can bury both of those. Today's teenagers just don't talk on the phone.
In fact, it seems that parents are about the only ones left using cell phones as actual phones. According to research by Nielsen, the average time "millennials"—18 to 34 year olds—spend talking on cell phones has dropped from 1,200 minutes to 900 minutes over the past two years, while the number of text messages they send has more than doubled.
Those numbers reflect a generation gap in how we communicate. While our generation sees it as more personal and polite to have a phone conversation, our children see cell phone calls as being impolite interruptions—whereas they see text messages as being less intrusive, as the Washington Post's Ian Shapira reports:
Kevin Loker, 20, a rising junior at George Mason University, said he and his school friends rarely just call someone, for fear of being seen as rude or intrusive. First, they text to make an appointment to talk. "They'll write, 'Can I call you at such-and-such time?' " said Loker. "People want to be polite. I feel like, in general, people my age are not as quick on their feet to just talk on the phone."
In fact, most of the calls I have with my teens are pre-arranged: calls home to let me know when my oldest son is done with work, or calls after I've texted requesting a call home to check in. My 16-year-old seems almost allergic to putting the phone to his ear, and gets off the phone as quickly as he can, especially when it's a call telling him something he needs to do.
But it's the same when communicating with friends. Whereas our generation tries to coordinate getting together by phone, a cell call is the last line of communication my younger son turns to when planning to meet with friends—mostly because they don't answer their cell phones, and their voice mail boxes are filled with unanswered voice mails from their parents. Meetups are usually planned by a text message, an instant message in XBox Live, a Facebook message, or possibly a Skype instant message followed by a voice conversation before a phone call is even considered.
Of course, given our propensities to talk, our generation more than makes up for the difference in cellular minute usage. So look at all those unused minutes as a little gift from your children to you.