Today's texting teenagers learn bad behaviour from their email-obsessed parents 'that it's OK to put people on pause'

You want horror stories of modern digital technology and its impact on society? It 's young people, who sleep with their phones. The girl, the texts in the shower with a plastic bag. The constant e-mails and posting on Facebook updates at breakfast and dinner.

Society can't escape unscathed by the emergence of a generation of children who are using mobile phones long before they had drivers licences, and can regularly send upwards of 3,000 text messages a month.

But what can parents do to help, if they stuck to their iPhones, or before a "work-life blur", thanks to the Blackberry, so that the invisible hand to reach the office in the evenings and weekends?

A battery of the Aspen Ideas Festival on gurus differed over the exact implications for good or bad - but they largely agree on one point, summarized by Bob Schukai:

Every once in a while, put your damn phone down and interact with human beings.

A more sophisticated version came from Sherry Turkle, a social science professor at MIT, who has spent years following adolescents and their use of new and social media.

Turkle is concerned that may teenager 'reliance on their mobile phones and social media can they keep not effectively able to develop empathy and - equally important - to cope alone or with difficult social situations by " rescue "on their cell phones.

But where young people learn their behavior? From their parents, Turkle says:

It 's the parents who are texting while driving, it' s the parents who are at dinner SMS.

So it is 's the parents who teach their children that, essentially, they are OK with a dinner with SMS.

It 's parents, who are modeling behavior that it' s OK to put people on break.

The childhood introduction to the continuous penetration of digital devices starting in childhood, with what Turkle called "Breastfeeding while SMS".

The answer, according to Turkle, is for parents to restrain themselves: "At school pick-up, if your child is coming out, that's not the time to take that last call," she says.

Parents can also set rules about where digital media is used in the household, establishing what she calls "sacred spaces" in the kitchen or bedrooms where texting or emailing is banned. "It sounds so simple but many families can't do that," she says.

Don 't say that, if they are 13 or 14, they say, when they are 8, 9 or 10 - we say it' s very important this time I'm with you. You can imagine 't think that if they are 14th

Talking and listening to children, without their mobile phone is always in the way important for parents: ". We 're the last generation of parents who know how valuable this information"

Turkle 's research - in her new book Alone Together - offers two insights that \ contradict the usual conception of today's teens as a "digital natives \," able to cope seamlessly with the attention-seeking demands of modern media.

One is that the young people they interviewed to perform under pressure in arenas such as Facebook, felt that she and \ take "vacation Facebook" to avoid perfomance anxiety.

The other is that the digital generation far more concerned about their privacy online when Mark Zuckerberg's would have us believe - says the Facebook founder, that privacy was not a "social norm".

"Young people are concerned about privacy," says Turkle, and that they regularly ask whether seeing their teachers, parents or even the police, which put them online.

The better news, according to Turkle, is that society's use of phones and tablets is still work in progress: "Relax, it's young, it's in its baby days."