Basic Teenager 101: breaking away from the control of a parent. According to a study conducted on teens at the University of Colorado Boulder and Children’s Hospital in Boston in which teens were pressured into turning down their iPods or MP3 players, they tended to crank the volume up even louder. Your garden variety teen rebellion. But keep in mind, these are kids who typically know the dangers of long-term exposure to loud music. Although, when you were a teen did you own a Walkman? (For those under 20 that might be reading this article, the Walkman is a relic from the distant past that played cassette tapes on the go. It eventually went the way of the 8-track…..Just ask you mother).

Perhaps it’s a macho thing. Tests have shown that teen boys like to pump up the funk louder than their female counterparts. So, can we presume that teen boys have something to prove? Head of the study, audiologist and doctoral candidate, Cory Portnuff put it this way. “We really don’t have a good explanation for why teens concerned about the hearing loss risk actually play their music louder than others,” he said. “But we do know that teens who knew what the benefits were of listening at lower levels had less hearing loss risk, which is why we believe targeted education is key.”

Another consideration is back in the olden days, when you were a teen, you got only a few hours of sound from your Walkman batteries. Today digital music players can run for 20 hours before recharging. So kids aren’t necessarily listening to their music any louder than we did, but they are listening to it longer.

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