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Kids Spend Every Waking Minute in Front of a Screen [STUDY]

The Kaiser Family Foundation has the results in from its latest media usage study, and it was enough to shock the authors.

The last time the Foundation looked at the media usage of 8- to 18-year-olds was five years ago, when they were at just shy of six and a half hours of media consumption per day. At that point, the study authors felt that they must have hit a ceiling on media usage.

Not so, according to the latest study, which puts the average up more than an hour to upwards of seven and a half hours per day. Plus, for the first time, time spent watching TV actually dropped in favor of other forms of media, including listening to music, using a computer, playing video games, reading print publications and watching movies.

Moreover, because so many of the kids are multitasking by consuming multiple forms of media at the same time, they actually end up consuming closer to 11 hours' worth of media content within that seven and half-hour span. Nor do those hours include the time kids are spending talking on their cell phones (half an hour) or sending text messages (an hour and a half).

Director of the Center on Media and Child Health and Boston pediatrician Dr. Michael Rich pointed to the ubiquity of media usage as an indicator that it may be too late to continue debating the question about whether media was a positive or negative influence on children's environment. Instead, media may have become essentially "like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat."

What do you think of the study results? Parents out there — have you noticed your children consuming more media over the past five years? Do you set any limitations or place any guidelines surrounding your kids' media usage?

[image credit: Diego Cupolo]

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