Family under the microscope

Your teenager's mobile phone use can reveal how they are feeling

Feeling clueless about what your teenager gets up to? New ­evidence might enable you to ­infer it from their mobile phone use. In a Spanish sample of 13-20-year-olds, 42% used theirs "intensively" – more than four calls a day. While a fifth met the criteria for addictive dependence: they answered "No" to the question "Could you be without your mobile phone for a day?" or "Yes" to "Do you think you are nothing without your mobile phone?" Girls were twice as dependent as boys (26% v 13%).

Being either dependent or ­intensive predicted trouble: school failure, smoking, excessive boozing, ­depression and dope smoking. There are plenty of other studies with similar results. In particular, depression may lead to heavy mobile phone use, ­preferred because it removes the need for self-hate inducing face-to-face ­communication. The lonely tend to use their mobiles for calls where they want the sound of a real voice at the other end to keep them company. The ­anxious have a preference for text messaging, not wanting the potential pitfalls of live conversation.

So, if you have got the usual level of non-communication with your teenage son or daughter, asking them about their mobile phone use could be a cunning ruse to find out what else they get up to or are really feeling. If you pay the bill, you can easily check out the intensity of their daily usage. They might well answer if you ask casually how they would cope without the device for a day or if they would cease to exist without it. If they prefer texting over calls, or vice versa, it might be a clue to whether they are lonely or anxious.

Most intriguing are the findings of the latest study of mobile phone use among students, and its relation to social approval and chameleonism (faking your personality). Such people are acutely aware of how they seem in the eyes of others, prone to acting in social situations, especially eager to be entertaining and liable to be talkative. Their question to themselves when presented with a new person is: "Who does this person want me to be?"

Chameleons are also prone to the commonest forms of addiction, from substances to gambling and sex. They tend to be lonely risk takers, keen on glittery physical and social baubles (conspicuous consumption and slick turns of phrase).

Sure enough, in the new study, ­chameleons talked more on their phones. They were also more ­liable to be dependent or intensive in their use of them. As they tend to have low self-esteem, this group are socially fragile, in need of constant reassurance.

So if your teenager or twentysomething is a heavy mobile phone user this may support your suspicion that they are even more of a chameleon than normal. They are part of a generation where self-presentation and image management are unprecedentedly important. It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it, in our wonderful white-collar world of work. How you seem counts for a lot in office politics and youth culture alike.

Directly raising the extent or type of their mobile phone usage will ­probably result in being told where to shove it. But if you can ­somehow get on to the subject of how much pressure they feel under to keep up with their peers, they might just be glad of the ­sympathy. If that can lead to a heart to heart, or even a psychotherapist, you might ultimately save on their phone bill.

Chameleon study: Takao, M et al, 2009, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12, 501-7. For more Oliver James, visit ­