14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KMF), children nowadays tend to spend at least ten hours each day watching electronic media, in a trend that appears to be growing more massive with each passing year. This state of affairs has led many researchers to ask whether kids are not missing out on a lot of other things that they should be doing at their age, such as playing with others and learning social skills that will come in handy later on in life.
The research was conducted on children aged between eight and 18, and the investigators determined that they used electronic media for up to seven hours and 38 minutes per day. This included watching TV, surfing the web, using cell phones, listening to music on their mp3 players, or using other gadgets. When the researchers factored in their calculations the fact that the vast majority of children were multitasking while using electronic equipment, their results modified considerably. It would appear now that children spend about ten hours and 45 minutes browsing media content.
“The amount of time young people spend with media has grown to where it's even more than a full-time work week. When children are spending this much time doing anything, we need to understand how it's affecting them – for good and bad,” KMF President and CEO Drew Altman explains. The investigation also determined that media usage among children tended to increase considerably over the past five years, by about one hour and 17 minutes each day.
“While the study cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, there are differences between heavy and light media users in this regard. About half (47 percent) of heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23 percent) of light users. These differences may or may not be influenced by their media use patterns. (Heavy users are the 21 percent of young people who consume more than 16 hours of media a day, and light users are the 17 percent of young people who consume less than 3 hours of media a day),” the report goes on to say.
“The bottom line is that all these advances in media technologies are making it even easier for young people to spend more and more time with media. It’s more important than ever that researchers, policymakers and parents stay on top of the impact it’s having on their lives,” the Vice President of KMF, and the leader of the new study, Victoria Rideout, concludes.