Kids and teens spending more time with entertainment media: study

January 21, 2010 by Emily Claire Afan

Surprise, surprise, young people are devoting more of their time to daily entertainment media use, according to the results of the latest Kaiser Family Foundation’s study on kids and media consumption.

Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year Olds found kids eight to 18 are spending an average of seven hours and 38 minutes using entertainment media in a typical day, amounting to more than 53 hours a week. That’s an hour and 17 minutes more than they did five years ago (2004). And with all that media multitasking (using more than one medium at a time), they consume a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those 7.5 hours.

The increased media use has been largely helped along by ready access to mobile devices, i.e. cell phones and iPods, and ownership rates of these devices has skyrocketed over past five years in this demo, leaping from 39% to 66% for cell phones, and from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players.

As for TV, the study found for the first time over the course of the study that the amount of time spent watching regularly scheduled TV declined by 25 minutes a day (from 2004 to 2009). On the flip side, the new ways to watch TV – online, cell phones, iPods – fed an increase in overall TV consumption from 3:51 to 4:29 per day.

For more info on the study, visit http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia012010nr.cfm.