Our kids and teenagers are communicating more differently than ever before. The note being passed from desk to desk has been replaced with words typed on a screen. Long phone conversations with friends every evening have given way to short, emoji laced text messages with pictures, videos, animated images, and links to other online content. Communication has evolved, or at least changed and it’s more common than you may have ever imagined. Just look at these statistics from April of 2015.
73% of teenagers have a smartphone and 91% of those teens text. Teenagers send and recieve and average of 30 text per day. (PEW Research Center)
More than nine out of ten teens who own a smartphone give and receive an average of 30 text messages every single day. That means, your child texts. The following abbreviations/phrases will give you greater insight to what messenger apps are capable of.
SMS
Short Messaging Service allows the user to send and recieve personal text messages between phones or email addresses. An SMS usually has a character limit (160 is most common.) SMS is not as common anymore as it once was, having been replaced by the MMS. Some prepay phones and apps for younger users will use SMS instead of the more capable and modern MMS systems.
You can’t send emojis, images, GIFs, or videos through SMS, only text. You most likely haven’t used SMS for five or more years.
EMS
Enhanced Messaging Service was an extension to standard SMS and allows group messaging and the sending and receiving of images, sound effects, text formatting, and ringtones. EMS wasn’t around long before it was replaced with MMS.
MMS
A Multimedia Messaging Service allows users to send multimedia (pictures, video, links, GIFs, and more) through the messaging system. Creation of the multimedia is usually supported in the service. This means users can take photos and videos or go find GIFs or images within the MMS app. This was actually featured in Apple’s latest update to their mobile operating system, allowing apps to be ported (installed into) the messaging app built in to every iPhone.
MMS allows the storage of multimedia messages so that users can come back to the app when they’ve missed a message and see it.
What Parents Should Know
You should be aware of what the messaging apps your children are using are capable of. You may have younger kids and prefer they only be able to send text messages. For this you’d want a SMS capable app and nothing more. If your kids are older, they’ll want to be able to send more than just text so you will have to navigate their use of MMS wisely.
Since so many of our kids and teens are sending messages to each-other over MMS, it’s important to understand that, on most messaging apps, they can share any image or video that they’d like. If you want to be able to control what messages your kids are sending then you may want to look at a service like TeenSafe that can keep track of messages for your inspection. Otherwise it’s a good idea to have a rule that you can see the phone whenever you ask and if you see that threads have deleted messages you need to have serious conversations. Your teen shouldn’t be sending or receiving messages that they may want to delete.
Finally, you should talk to your child/teen about what to do if they’re sent a message they aren’t comfortable with, whether it be images, video, or even just inappropriate text, they need to know that it’s a violation of their privacy (and sometimes federal law) and needs to be addressed immediately.
Now you’re armed with some nerdy knowledge about what your kids can do in their messaging apps. This should help you choose which apps are right for them and help you know the language when you’re choosing what software to use to protect them. Tomorrow we’ll be looking at some mobile device vocabulary that will help you better understand online privacy and security. Be sure to check in again!