Why can’t they be like we were,
Perfect in every way?
What’s the matter with kids today?
-Bye Bye Birdie, 1963
The results of the 2009 Kaiser Family Foundation study, “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year Olds,” has confirmed what a lot of us suspected, only worse.
Today, the 8-18 year-old age cohort devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes per day, more than 53 hours a week, to using entertainment media. If you factor in media multitasking (texting while watching TV for example,) that seven-and-a-half hours counts as 10 hours and 45 minutes.
That’s an increase of an hour and seventeen minutes a day since the last study in 2004. At that time it was thought media use among kids had topped out, because it couldn’t possibly get any higher.
Fooled us I guess.
The study cites a number of factors:
*Increased ownership of mobile devices like cell phones and iPods by kids. An increase of 39 to 66 percent for cell phones, and from 18 to 76 percent for iPods and other MP3 players.
*Media in the home; 64 percent of young people say the TV is usually on during meals, 45 percent say the TV is on “most of the time” when nobody is watching. Seventy-one percent of kids surveyed have a TV in their bedroom, 50 percent have a game player.
*Social networking via texting and sites such as Facebook.
And then there’s that rules thing. Only 28 percent of young people say they have rules about how much time they can spend watching TV, 30 percent have rules for video games, and 36 percent for computer time.
And rules make a difference. Kids with parental rules report three hours a day less media consumption than kids without rules. And while stressing that correlation does not prove cause and effect, heavy media use correlates rather strongly (47 percent) with lower grades in school.
There is some good news. Time spent reading books remained steady at about 25 minutes a day. Time reading magazines and newspapers dropped, but a lot of them have gone on-line, so that may just be the difference in how it’s delivered. I’m waiting to see what the effect of Kindle-type devices have on news media consumption.
Some of this is not as big a deal as we might think. Notice that a lot of that media use is leaving the TV on basically for background noise. I myself often leave the news on, listening with half an ear while waiting for a story I’m following to come up.
Also, a lot of that “media consumption” is listening to music on portable devices. I know it’s probably not Mozart, but with the exception of some hateful rap, I don’t see much harm in that.
Nonetheless as a parent I am concerned.
There is also some good-and-bad news. When I was a kid, the most TV channels you could get anywhere was three, and frankly I don’t remember all that much golden about “the Golden Age of Television.”
Now with cable or satellite, you can get hundreds of channels. With the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, etc, there’s something interesting, informative and educational available 24/7.
But, this is all sedentary activity and it shows. Obesity is way up among kids, and the Pentagon says most young people who want to join the military can’t pass the physical.
Other than Viewing with Alarm, opinions differ about how to deal with this, or whether it can be dealt with at all.
In our home, we have a daily limit on screen time. That’s all screen time, computer plus TV plus games total. How they divide their alloted time between media is up to them. There is of course, no limit on reading time.
Furthermore, we control content. Certain TV programs are off limits for kids. No vicarious killing of human beings in videogames, and no TV in the bedroom. Not now, not ever.
Yes the rules bend sometimes. And yes there are fights over them sometimes.
But as my wife says, “What’s wrong with saying no?”
Will it do any good in this media-saturated society?
Ask me in 20 years.