If you’re a parent, you may think your kids spend their whole lives surfing the web, watching TV, or listening to their iPods. Turns out you’re right. A recent report from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, based on its 2009 survey of media use by children from ages 8 to 18, finds that:
Kids today average 7.5 hours a day with some form of media. That’s more time than “in any other activity besides (maybe) sleeping,” Kaiser’s research team notes — “almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five.”
Add to that number the time spent multitasking — listening to music while visiting Facebook, thumbing through magazines while watching TV, texting a friend while playing a video game — and the hours run even higher. By this count, kids are exposed to 10.75 hours of media each day — a three-hour increase from 1999, when Kaiser launched its media surveys.
The researchers deliberately excluded school-related use of the media, as well as time spent phoning or texting. So you can add in another 56 minutes to cover kids who talk on cell-phones during a typical day, as just over half do. What about those who text? They send an average of 118 messages a day.
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