Unlimited text messaging plans might save money on your cell phone bill, but many health experts are starting to believe that too much texting might be harmful to young people’s physical and mental health, The New York Times reports.

According to the article, the Nielsen Company—a media research conglomerate—found that the average teen sends 80 text messages a day. Health experts worry that this can lead to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, thumb injuries and sleep deprivation.

Martin Joffe, MD, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, California, surveyed students at two local high schools and found that some were texting hundreds of times a day. “That’s one every few minutes,” he said. “Then you hear that these kids are responding to texts late at night. That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.”

Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is the director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that texting may also affect how young people establish freedom from their parents. “If technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do,” she said in the Times story. “Now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’”

Parents, too, would benefit from placing boundaries on their own text messaging, which can be as obsessive and frequent as their children’s, Turkle said. Teens view this as a double standard and often feel cheated of their parents’ attention.

“Even though [teens] text 3,500 messages a week, when they walk out of their ballet lesson, they’re upset to see their dad in the car on the BlackBerry,” Turkle said. “The fantasy of every adolescent is that the parent is there, waiting, expectant, completely there for them.”