OMG! Latino Teens Text The Most while Driving

By Tania Haiman, Being Latino

A recent study by AT&T revealed that 54 percent of Latino teens “admit to texting while driving compared to 41% of Caucasians and 42% of African-American teenagers.” They also ranked higher when asked if they texted while stopped at a red light, or glanced at their phone, either driving or stopped at a red light.

SMH.

What’s worse, Latino teens “are much more likely to report that their parents text while driving or text while stopped at a light than Caucasian or African-American teenagers.” More than 50 percent of the Latino teens surveyed reported that their parents text while driving and 65 percent say they do it while stopped at a red light. When asked if they strongly agreed, somewhat agreed, somewhat disagreed or strongly disagreed with the following statement: “Adults say that kids should not text or email while driving but they do it themselves—all the time.” A whopping 85″ of Latino teenagers strongly agreed.

SMH again.  Mamá and papá aren’t setting a good example.

AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson said that “more than 100,000 times each year, an automobile crashes and people are injured or die while a driver was texting and driving”, according to a statistic from the National Safety Council. In an effort to curb texting while driving, AT&T has initiated a campaign called “It Can Wait”. The campaign encourages people to take a no-texting-and-driving pledgeand forward the link to their contacts on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Being that the incidence of texting and driving is so high among Latino teens (and apparently their parents too), maybe AT&T should provide a Spanish version of their campaign to get the message across to Spanish-dominant Latinos. Talk to your teenagers about the dangers of texting and driving and take the pledge together.

My 17-year-old daughter and I just did.

This article was first published in Being Latino.