by Rushworth M. Kidder

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.

These are jarring numbers. Yet it’s all too easy for parents to tumble into the ain’t-it-awful syndrome, writing off every encounter with the media as a corrupting and unethical force. But parents themselves use a lot of media — listening to radio news, watching sports on TV, using the web to plan trips. If media isn’t automatically unethical for their parents, why should it be so for kids? Even multitasking may have a silver lining: Children accustomed to multiple inputs may learn to work comfortably in environments that, for adults, would be impossibly distracting.

Still, the report (“Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” by Victoria Rideout, Ulla Foehr, and Donald Roberts) hints at enormous ethical issues behind these findings. The video-gaming 14-year-old who shrinks inward and loses human contact with his peers, the 13-year-old who sends a nude video clip of herself via cell-phone to a friend and finds it lodged forever on YouTube, the heavy TV user who searches out ever more violent and abusive programming to satisfy his thirst for excitement, the texting teenage driver who kills herself and others on the highway — all of them cry out for attention. What can parents do?

First, be alert to heavy use versus ordinary consumption. The Kaiser report finds that heavy users of media — the one-fifth of all kids who are exposed to more than 16 hours of media content each day — get lower grades in school and report lower levels of personal contentment. (A caution, however: This report doesn’t examine whether kids perform poorly and feel discontented because they immerse themselves in media, or whether they seek solace in media because they aren’t happy and can’t hack the schoolwork.) By contrast, the survey suggests that “heavy readers” who “spend an hour or more a day with print media” are more likely than light readers to get good grades. Wherever media and children interface, it seems, lighter correlates with better.

Second, recognize that while you can’t turn back the clock to a simpler age, you can manage this interface. Kids raised in homes where parents leave the TV running in the background all day (45 percent of all households) or turn it on during mealtimes (64 percent of all households) become much heavier users than other children — as do children whose parents let them have TVs in their bedrooms. By contrast, “children whose parents make an effort to limit media use — through the media environment they create in the home and the rules they set — spend less time with media than their peers,” report these authors. Although the Kaiser study doesn’t say so explicitly, setting such limits probably affects children’s performance in school. Nearly one-third of these kids admit they multitask while doing their homework, a habit that rises in proportion as kids have easier access to electronic devices.

Conclusion? “Kids whose parents don’t put a TV in their bedroom, don’t leave the TV on during meals or in the background when no one is watching, or do impose some type of media-related rules spend substantially less time with media than do children with more media-lenient parents.”

Media-lenient parents. The phrase ought to send a shiver down the parental spine — in part because becoming “media-lenient” is so easy to do these days. Parents don’t usually see media as a conditioner of life or a moral influence. Media is just … well, there. Like a morning drizzle or the sound of distant traffic, it’s a fact of life — a mild annoyance at times and a slight comfort at others, but nothing you can do much about.

Or so we often think. As it turns out, it’s more than a mere annoyance — and it’s not beyond our control. The increasing willingness of young people to marinate themselves in the media reminds us that parents have a moral obligation to help them resist the stuff they’re soaking up.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

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