Study: Children
Overwhelmed by Media
THE PROBLEM
The Henry J. Kaiser Family
Foundation, one of the nation’s leading institutions devoted
to research about health-care issues and their impact on the
public sphere, this week released its new study
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to
18-Year-Olds. The study found that, on average,
children and teens
ages 8-18 spend more than 53 hours a week using
entertainment media -- but because most of that time is
spent using more than one form of media at once
(simultaneously watching TV, listening to music, looking at
a MySpace page online, and sending text messages to friends,
for example), they actually use more than 75 hours a week
with entertainment media – almost double the time
they spend in school!
This increase in media use by
children and teens is largely caused by the availability of
mobile devices like cell phones and iPods. Today, 66% of 8-
to 18-year-olds have their own cell phones, compared to 39%
five years ago. And 76% of children have their own iPods or
other MP3 players. Young people now spend more time
listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their
cell phones than they spend talking on them. Online
activities also contribute to increased media time, with
teens involved in gaming, social networking, and looking at
online video. Three-quarters of all 7th-12th graders say
they have a profile on a social networking site like
MySpace. And African-American and Hispanic children are
especially hard-hit by media; the Kaiser study found that
children in these groups consume nearly 4 ½ hours more media
daily than do whites, with African-American children
watching almost twice as much TV per day as do white
children.
THE IMPACT
Because of the rise of new
technology like Internet-enabled cell phones, children have
a multitude of ways to access media. This makes it that much
more difficult for their parents to monitor what their
children are watching, and to limit their child’s exposure
to inappropriate programming. Increased time spent in front
of electronic media means more exposure to harmful media
content, whether Internet pornography, child predators who
lurk in chat rooms and sites popular with young children, or
sex, violence, and profanity on television.
For decades, television has
reached children at a younger age, and for more time in a
day, than any other socializing institution except the
family. And the new technology has compounded the problem
by making it easier for children to media multi-task. Thus,
parents are not only spending less time with their children,
sharing their beliefs and values, providing them with moral
foundation and talking to them about the messages they are
seeing on television; the harmful messages children are
seeing are instead being reinforced by other media they are
consuming.
Based on recent PTC research,
those harmful messages include increased depictions of
violence against women, and increased depictions of sex
outside of the context of marriage (often with themes of
sadism, masochism, pornography, prostitution, rape,
adult-child relationships and more) on television alone.
And on the Internet sites most visited by children, like
YouTube, links to hardcore pornography and sexually explicit
messages posted by site users are common.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Limiting children’s media use
is crucial to reducing the impact of negative media messages
on them. Even if the content they are consuming is mostly
harmless, time spent with electronic media has been linked
to a number of negative outcomes for children, ranging from
reduced academic performance, to increased likelihood of
obesity, childhood diabetes, problems with sleep, and
depression.
Parents should establish and
enforce household rules on media use, both with respect to
how much time children may spend using electronic media, and
with respect to which media products are off-limits. (Only
about three in ten young people say they have rules about
how much time they can spend watching TV, using the
computer, or playing video games. But the study found that
when parents do set limits, children spend less time
with media. Those with any media rules consume nearly 3
hours less media per day than those with no rules.)
Children should not have TVs
and game consoles in their bedrooms. By confining TVs,
computers and game consoles to family rooms, parents can
significantly limit the amount of time kids spend with such
media, as well as easily monitoring children’s activity.
Similarly, parents who wish to buy their children cell
phones should opt for phones that allow the child to only
place and receive phone calls.
To read the Kaiser
Foundation’s full report,
click here.
For more on how media affects
your children,
click here.
