The young people are pretty hard to keep up with these days (Facebook! Rap music!) but it turns out they're actually a little tamer than we all assumed, as a new study indicates only one percent of kids between the ages of ten and seventeen have actually "sexted." However, seven percent of them reported receiving sexually explicit pictures via text, which means that even if they don't like to actually take nudie shots, they really like to forward them to each other.
What explains the discrepancy between these numbers and previous reports that hysterically announced up to twenty percent of teens involved in sexting? Firstly, the new study's authors say other researchers included subjects over eighteen and into their early twenties, as opposed to actual teenagers. They also included in their definition of sexting pictures "no more revealing than what someone might see at a beach," according to one researcher, rather than genuinely explicit images.
One teen-health expert helpfully explained that even kids who are full-on sexting aren't bringing about the end of western civilization, but that "teenagers are neurologically programmed to do dumb things."
Well, guess that's one thing to check off the list. Now whatever happened to bath salts? Are those still trendy with young people, and should we be worried?
