Did you know?
- More kids aged 2-5 can play a computer game than ride a bike.
- While 19 percent of kids aged 2-5 know how play with a smartphone application, only nine percent of kids those age know how to tie their shoelaces.
- more children can open a web browser (25 percent) than swim unaided (20 percent).
This is according to research conducted by the Internet Security Company AVG where they polled 2,200 mothers with Internet access and with children aged 2-5 in the U.S., Canada, the EU5 (France, Germany, Spain, Britain and Italy), Japan, New Zealand and Australia.
It's truly is a sign of the times. Our kids are so immersed in technologies that the basic skills we took for granted as kids are falling by the wayside. Who does not remember biking on the local streets with our friends?
In a previous blog post, I said I’d try to find out what kids actually do with technology and I got lots of answers. There’s tonnes of research looking at ‘digital kids’. One of the most powerful studies, though, has to be three successive reports completed by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Not only did they look into kids’ media use, but also the effect this consumption had on kids.
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of three studies (1999, 2004 and 2009) and is one of the largest and most comprehensive studies on media use among American youth. It’s worth a read. Here are some of its findings:
The Rise of Media Use among US Kids
The amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically. 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).
As they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those 7½ hours.
More Kids Own Cell Phones and iPods
Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in ownership among 8- to 18-year-olds: from 39% to 66% for cell phones, and from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players. Young people now spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their cell phones (a total of :49 daily) than they spend talking on them (:33).
Parents Don’t Set Rules about Media Use
Only about three in ten young people say they have rules about how much time they can spend watching TV (28%) or playing video games (30%), and 36% say the same about using the computer.
What Kids do on Their Media Devices
Time spent with every medium other than movies and print increased over the past five years:
- 47 minutes a day increase for music/audio,
- 38 minutes for TV content,
- 27 minutes for computers, and
- 24 minutes for video games.
In total, US kids now spend on average the following amount of time on media every day:
- TV remains the dominant type of media content consumed, at 4hours and 29 minutes a day,
- music/audio at 2 hours and 31 minutes,
- computers at 1 hour and 29 minutes ,
- video games at 1 hour and 13 minutes,
- print at 38 minutes, and
- movies at 25 minutes.
Grades Are Suffering
About half (47%) of heavy media users (kids who consume more than 16 hours of media a day) say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23%) of light users (kids who consume less than 3 hours of media a day).
The study is quick to point out that these differences may or may not be influences by their media use.
And They Multitask Media Consumption with Homework
About half of young people say they use media either “most” (31%) or “some” (25%) of the time they’re doing their homework.
There you have it – our 'digital natives' accounted for. Their media use is focused on entertainment and very little on learning.
