2. Make way for diabesity. With current projections, one in three Americans will become diabetic come 2050. Adults who sleep six hours or less crave sugar and fat - and eat more of both. So far, studies show kids getting less than nine hours sleep gain weight. And the sleep interruptions of texting, or even thinking about or waiting for texts, will probably decrease deep sleep - perhaps a lot. Deep sleep is when we produce growth hormone, needed to sculpt muscles and grow tissues, including the brain.
Will our kids get shorter and fatter?

3. Deranged body clocks - even small amounts of light turn off melatonin, the hormone of night. The bright light of cell phones won't just knock off melatonin but may shift biological clocks later. Biologically, teenagers' inner clocks make them to go to bed and rise later than children and many adults.

4. I sing the body electric - Walt Whitman didn't know that every human cell is a major electrical generator, or how quickly cellular information moves through electrical channels. Yet nobody really knows the long term effects of cell phones attached to brain and body 24 hours a day - for years. So far the population studies are not scary, but there are innumerable potential health effects, including some we don't yet imagine.

Results: Social

5. Transport will never be the same. Perhaps half of kids admit to texting while driving - truckers who text increase accidents 23 fold. If kids text in bed, in class, walking next to the kids they're texting and under the dining room table as their parents try to talk to them, they won't stop when they get behind the wheel.
Plus it's hard to tell whether someone is texting while driving, making enforcement difficult.
Expect more wrecks from endless texts.

6. The future of porn is here. It's difficult to understand the total porn economy, but estimates are European cell phone porn has reached $3 billion a year.
Numbers are less in the US, where IT suppliers have tried to avoid porn purveyors, particularly Apple, which may recognize the future size of the IT education market.
Yet the future may prove different. In less than perfect surveys in 2009, a third of teens said they sexted (texted sexual content.) Some Australian surveys find perhaps 80% of year ten (tenth grade) students sext.
What better time for the porn industry to advance their product than when clients are in bed? And the kids are already doing it - themselves.

7. Prepare for the cyborg future. Humans beings have a wonderful internal design, and unlike machines we regenerate ourselves. The proteins pumping your blood last 60-90 minutes before they're pulped and recycled, your gut and heart are essentially remade in a few days. Try getting your car engine to recreate itself in 3 days.
Much of our biological regeneration takes place during rest, including sleep. But now personal electronic devices operate 24 hours - effectively making many of us round the clock shiftworkers.
That means A. For many rest is not a waste a time but the enemy - time away from the desired non-stop social connections teenagers get through the net. Quiet, contemplative time, when people actually think, could become less valued in the future. B. Sustained attention needed for sustained achievement, may take a real beating. If you don't rest you don't rebuild right. C. Kids will imagine 4 PM is not much different from 4 AM - through everything about human performance changes through the time of day, from drug effects to how well you remember - with lesser performance the result.

Bottom Line

Remember the days when kids played outside and talked to you at the dinner table?
Recognize that unrested kids become unrested adults. They face higher heart disease, stroke, and depression rates. Their increasing weight and upended insulin metabolism will help bankrupt an already near-bankrupt health care system. Texting all the time means driving will never be the same.
And many basic pleasures of life will also change. When attention is short, people tired and cranky, the flow experiences of life that lead to peak pleasure and creativity may become less frequent.
We shouldn't let that happen. Take a tip from the older generation - turn off the electronics when you go to bed, and plug in your cell phone for another day.
And talk with your kid - face to face.