Media Use and the Impact on our Children
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Between cell phones, televisions and computers, our kids are spending an average of 7 and ½ hours a day in front of some type of electronic media. TV…iPod…cell phone…computer. For some kids, that’s as much if not more time than they spend in school!
The Kaiser Family Foundation just released a fascinating study on the interaction of kids and media…and (hopefully) to no one’s surprise, media consumption growing. In 2004, kids were averaging 6 hours and 21 minutes per day…so in the past 5 years, consumption has grown 18%. Quite a jump.
One surprising statistic is that most parents don’t seem to realize how much time their kids are spending staring at some sort of screen…keep in mind that 7.5 hours/day is the average…heavy media users peak at 16 hours/day with light media users around 3. This amount of time seems crazy, but if you take a minute and think about it…the time adds up quickly…think of all the time you spend on your Blackberry…from calls…to email…to texting…to photos…it is amazing and needs to be managed.
Some other numbers really jumped out at me…71% of kids have a TV in their room and 64% watch TV during dinner. The number one recommendation for reducing the “over consumption” of media is to pull the TV out of the room. Duh! Of the 7.5 hours, TV amounts to approx 4.5 hours, with music at 2.5 hours, computers at 1.5 hours, video at a little over 1 hour and the cell phone at 49 minutes. This is interesting to me…I have always thought my family was a little odd…but these numbers don’t reflect my family. My kids are on computers over 2 hours/day doing homework – this may be because their school uses an online learning management system so they have to be online to get homework assignments and/or for online tutorials. They also spend way more than 49 minutes on their phones (especially if you count texting!) Lastly, TV time for my family is WAY below 4.5 hours as well.
Here is some other interesting data…at least for parents…47% of heavy media consumers (16 hours/day) reported having lower grades in school compared with only 23% of light media users (3 hours per day). So there appears to be correlation between too much media and not studying…who would have guessed…LOL.
So jump out and take a look at the study yourself…and see how your family stacks up. I found it fascinating and it confirms that my family isn’t normal! At last I have proof!





