You Sent How Many Texts…14,512? Texting By The Numbers
My friend, Tracy, recently posted on her Facebook page some interesting numbers. More specifically, as she said on her post, "some interesting stats about her family". Sadly, I'm sure these numbers look familiar to many parents of teens that text. This is what she said,
I was going through some stuff and found some interesting stats about my family and our phones.
Going back to the month of November, our family had a total of 15,485 text messages. Of those, 14,512 were done by Seth. (By the way, that's Tracy's son who is in high school.) That leaves 973 texts for the rest of the family.
In December, the total number of texts were 15,763. Seth had 13,918...leaving 1,845 for the family.
Starting the New Year with a fewer texts, but these are the numbers. January's total, 11,711 texts...11,211 by Seth....500 for the rest of the family.
Taking us to our last bill....in February, 11,580 total text messages, only 9,980 by Seth and 1,600 for the family.
After this post, many of Tracy's friends, (including me) quickly pointed out to her that even though that did seem like a lot of text messages that Seth was sending, at least over the past couple months, the numbers had started to to down.
Tracy's response,
True. But let's break some numbers down. Let's just say its a 30 day billing cycle. And during the school year, Seth is in school 7+ hours a day for around 22 days of that month. Seth has had basketball practice 1-2 hours for most of those 22 days, even worked a few hours a week at his part-time job. But doing some rounding of the numbers, and dividing it out, that's an average of 386 texts a day! How? When?
I know these numbers are no surprise to many parents of texting children. Some of these numbers may even be small to some families. But after seeing these numbers, I think the next time I get my cell phone bill, I'm going to be looking a little closer at my own family stats.
But have no fear, my dear friend Tracy! I found a girl that has sent more text messages than Seth. Her record number of text messages tops Seth's by 22,154. A proclaimed "textaholic", Rachel from New Jersey has a personal text record of 36,666 text messages. So if you think your child has a texting problem, or if parents just don't understand the need for sending texts in the amount that kids do, watching this might answer your questions.