Is Group Texting Harmless for Kids?
Why this mom removed group texting from her son’s phone
Intro from Melanie Hempe:
Earlier this month, this fantastic Substack post about group texting was shared. We immediately knew we had to reshare it. Because while most parents we talk to have heard about the harms of social media, many are shocked to hear that group texting is another form of social media.
In a previous podcast episode, which you’ll see mentioned in the post below, Dr. Stacy and I discussed how allowing group texts increases your child’s risk of bullying and porn exposure, not to mention overall distraction. Cindy, the mother behind the Building Family Health Subtack, illustrates all these points so eloquently, and she also adds another interesting layer: group texting can bring out the worst in your child’s behavior. That’s because group texting is not a communication tool but, like social media, is a platform, one that can cause our children to perform and “show off” for their audience through foul language and put-downs.
By disabling group texting and keeping text communication one-on-one through these teenage years, you are not overprotecting your child. You are giving them the level of responsibility their teenage brains can handle so that they can learn skills like self-control, and you are allowing them to stay connected to friends while allowing them to be good friends.
And with that, here’s Cindy’s story.
Near the end of our son’s 8th grade year, we bought a Gabb Phone Plus for him to use. It was a talk-text phone, with no internet or social media. But it did include group texting and also image and video texting.
Prior to the purchase, I had wondered whether we should buy Gabb’s basic phone or the one-up version that my son was pushing for. He said that he wanted the enhanced music capabilities that came with the Gabb Phone Plus. And at the time, aside from the slight uptick in cost, I didn’t think the choice mattered between the two. But I was wrong. It did end up mattering.
Realizing I’d Made a Mistake
Looking back at my emails, I see that I contacted Gabb almost 1 month exactly after buying the phone, writing “Hello — We have a Gabb Phone Plus. If there's a way to disable the MMS so that we're not receiving photo and videos in text messages, could you please tell me how to do that?” (MMS stands for multimedia messaging service.)
I received a response back from Jonathan at Gabb: “Thank you for reaching Gabb Wireless Support! I will be assisting you today with your inquiry. Unfortunately, that option is not available on the Gabb Phone Plus. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause…”
I wrote back to Jonathan, explaining my concerns in more detail, still hoping that something could be done: “…I probably should've gotten the regular Gabb phone for our family. We've already had issues with one of my son's classmates sending an inappropriate cartoon through text, and we're also running into some frustrations with group texting. Does Gabb offer a return or exchange on phones?”
It took another 4 months of back-and-forth emails and a walk-me-through-the-steps phone call to finally get things sorted out, but I was grateful that Gabb worked through this with me. Ultimately, we ended up buying a second phone—Gabb’s basic phone—and moved our existing line and SIM card to the new phone. I then stowed away the Gabb Phone Plus in an undisclosed location in our home.
While going through this process, my son, who disapproved of the downgrade, pointed out numerous times that I was losing money and how nonsensical my efforts were. But as each month went by from the time of the original purchase, it became more and more clear that my son’s brain was not ready for this type of tech interaction. We needed to take a step back to help him, even though he didn’t and still doesn’t see it as help.
The Downsides of Group Texting
Yes, group texting is great for getting out a message to a slew of people within seconds, and it can make coordination easier for sure. But those benefits can come at a cost, especially for preteens and teens, whose maturity and self-control may not match what’s needed for navigating the possible ramifications of group texting.
In our household, I took on the role of periodically checking our son’s text messages. I felt it was my responsibility as his parent to know what kind of communication was occurring on a device that I had bought. Our son has privacy in other areas of his life, but this is one area where he doesn’t, and he’s aware of it.
Well, it didn’t take much time for my concerns to pop up. This is what I saw: (1) foul language used on the regular, as if it was an essential part of speech; (2) put-downs that appeared to cross the line of being light-hearted and comical; (3) pictures and images that either were inappropriate or didn’t seem in line with a healthy perspective or self-worth, and (4) an alarming number of daily messages.
I talked to my son about the foul language used in the group chats, including by him, but he just couldn’t stop himself, even after several warnings. Then there were the put-downs and slights. Young teens are meant to make awkward, sometimes thoughtless social mistakes and to hopefully learn from them. But as we know, with text messaging, you can’t see when you’ve gone too far, when your words have, in fact, caused harm, and when your comments have started to erode friendships instead of strengthen them.
What was interesting though, from my anecdotal observations, was that the profanity and put-downs occurred only in group chats, not in the one-on-one messages between my son and another friend. There was something about the nature of group texting that pushed these boys to strive to both impress and diminish each other in negative ways. This wasn’t what we wanted our son to be exposed to or involved in.
Group Texting is Social Media
A few months after we switched to the basic Gabb phone, the ScreenStrong Families Podcast had an episode on group texting. I remember being eager to listen to it, wondering if my concerns were shared by others. I felt relief when I discovered they were. Dr. Adriana Stacey, a board-certified psychiatrist who works with teens and college students, said that group texting in middle school years was the number one issue she heard from parents who kept an eye on their children’s texts.
In the podcast episode, Dr. Stacey validated the similarities between group texting and social media. “It is exactly like social media. It’s just like having an Instagram account or Snapchat account,” she said. This seems true when considering the social media definition Dr. Stacey cited, which was “Digital technology that allows the sharing of ideas and information, including text and visuals, through virtual networks and communities.”
Melanie Hempe, founder of ScreenStrong, went on to stress that the ScreenStrong organization recommends no smartphone or social media through high school. Both women also recommended avoiding group texting through middle school—a developmental stage when kids can be immature, impulsive, and straight-up mean—as well as into high school. From what I saw with my son and his classmates, I now think this makes excellent sense.
Hempe provided the brain science on why we want to hold off on allowing this age to use group texting: “…their brains are developing…their frontal lobes aren’t connected like they need to be, their judgment is not where we want it to be, and so a lot of times they do things that, of course as adults, we would never do.” She explained that there is nothing wrong with this developmental stage. Kids are simply growing up.
But instead of having parents stand back and watch, Dr. Stacey urged parents “to support [children] and usher them to the next developmental stage, with the appropriate boundaries in place.” I appreciated her reminder that one of our jobs as parents is to establish health-promoting boundaries even when they are unpopular by society or our kids.
Time Lost to Group Texting
Hempe and Dr. Stacey talked through a number of other issues with group texting. One was the sheer number of messages. Dr. Stacey told the story of a girl who showed her that she had received 1,084 unread text messages during the school day in response to a single group chat.
It reminded me of one weekend when my son played in a hockey tournament and a teammate had set up a group chat specific for that tournament. My son didn’t have a phone at the time, so instead he gave my number to the teammate. Not long after, pinging messages started coming in and kept coming in at a dizzying rate. There were hundreds of messages. I couldn’t keep up. At the end of the weekend, I asked my husband to take on the next tournament. When I asked him what the group chat was like back then, he said, “I had to block it. It was too much. It was non-stop.”
We can laugh at the stories of ridiculous numbers of text messages, but in all seriousness, not only can group texting be overwhelming for our children but it can also displace their time. If kids are trying to catch up on hundreds of texts, it inevitably takes away from time spent hanging out in-person with a friend, playing a game of Uno with family, running around outside, reading a book, working on sports skills, cooking their own breakfast, swimming at the pool, daydreaming. Our children’s time is not limitless during their one sacred childhood.
My Son Without Group Texting
Now that our son no longer has group texting, he mostly uses the phone as I had intended it—contacting a parent to coordinate drives home from school, asking a classmate about a homework assignment, texting a friend to meet up at the pool. Profanity and put-downs haven’t been an issue in his one-on-one conversations, which tend to be short and to the point now. And it puts me at ease to know he’s not being swept into endless electronic chattering.
Yes, he’s missed out on a few unofficial sports team group chats, including one that meant he initially had the wrong color undershirt for a basketball game. And at times, he’s been temporarily out of the loop on plans made by friends. But I think it’s a small price to pay, considering all of the negatives he’s avoiding while we take this pause.
It’s Not Too Late
It may feel uncomfortable or maybe even impossible, but parents are allowed to change their minds on their tech rules as they acquire more information, whether it be anecdotal or scientific. We can say to our children, “I made a mistake. I have a better understanding of how this is not a good match for your age and stage of brain development, and we’re going to pause for now.”
Where to start? ScreenStrong has the resources to help.
If you are looking for more support and a way to explain all this science to your tweens and teens, our Summer Fun Bundle can help. It includes our 30-day reset, a day-by-day, week-by-week guide for removing toxic screens from your home and replacing them with real-world skills and family connection. It also includes access to the parent AND student versions of our Kids’ Brains & Screens course, as well as our Connect parent group, where you will meet like-minded families who can support you on this journey. It’s never too late to get your kids back!
Yes! We tell our parents all the time that group text is just a more closed version of social media. It elevates dopamine especially with rapidfire texting, opens up the possibility of content harm, and breeds drama.