New Study Shows Kids' Media Use Going Up
Smart phones, MP3 players, laptops and other devices are the air kids breathe - perhaps too deeply, judging from a new study that shows children eight to 18 devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes a day consuming some form of media for fun. That's an hour and 17 minutes more than they did five years ago, said the study's sponsor, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. And they're champion multitaskers, packing content on top of content for an even heavier onslaught.
"This is a game changer," co-author Donald Roberts said during a panel discussion when the survey of 2,002 young people was released Wednesday. "We're really close to kids being online 24/7."
Kids, the survey showed, now spend more time listening to music, playing games and watching TV on their cellphones than talking on them. Perhaps more surprising; only about three of 10 said their parents have rules about how much time they can spend watching TV or playing video games.
Not all parents consider that time spent on technology is a bad thing. Craig Kaminer's 19-year-old and 16-year-old boys have laptops, high-speed internet connections, Xbox, HDTV, iPhones, video chat, DirectTV with DVR, Kindles and digital cameras.
"They're connected to the internet, each other and us from the second they wake up until they go to sleep," said Kaminer of St. Louis. "In general, they're very grounded and handle the balance well."
Others, though, find balance elusive.
Things changed for Betsy Tant in Knoxville, Tenn., when her 11-year-old daughter received an iTouch for Christmas.
"She's obsessed with it all of a sudden," said Tant, 40. "That really caught me off guard. She's had a computer for a while, but now she wants to check her e-mail all the time. We've had to set limits."
Tant considers herself an exception in the limit-setting department, refusing to provide her daughter text service, for instance. Many parents she knows don't bother.
"It gets them out of their hair, I think," she said.
With so much temptation - internet-equipped mobile devices, better home connectivity, video gaming online and off, social media and TV - like content on any device - many parents say that their children's schoolwork is suffering.
The researchers warned that further study is required to link media use with any impact on the health of young people or on their grades. But 47% of heavy media users among those surveyed said they earn mostly Cs or lower, compared with 23% of light users. The study classified heavy users as consuming more than 16 hours a day and light users as less than three hours.
Dr. Russell Hyken, a therapist who specializes in tweens and teens, is seeing a growing number of young patients with obsessive interest in gaming and computers, including a high-school junior who took to urinating in a bottle while playing online and a college kid who shaved his head to save time on hair washing in the shower so he could return to the computer more quickly.
Both, he said, were sent to residential treatment programs for those and related problems. "It's almost an obsessive-compulsive desire to be the best. One client had to be in the top five scores on a website at which half a million people were playing," Hyken said. "They're using it as a way to escape reality."
Hyken said there's no way around the need for parents to take charge. He suggests setting up a central location far from bedrooms at night to plug in all devices, and holding firm on no TV computer use after certain hours, with absolutely none during meals. Encourage extracurricular activities away from home, where use of mobile devices would be impossible, like sports.
"It's never too late to start but much harder when they're 15 or 16," he said. "If a kid is making good grades and is in some extracurricular activity or working part-time, and they're nice to their parents, you've won the game."
