Healthy screen time & quality media: teens

The media-saturated world that surrounds your kids has made an indelible impact on them… thing is, nobody is quite sure just what that impact is. Has technology caused damage to kids’ ability to focus, to interact, and to relax without outside stimulation? Or has our tech-driven culture expanded opportunities, creativity, and taught new skills in ways we should be heralding? Experts aren’t sure… it’s that simple. Because it’s complicated.

Earlier this week the Kaiser Family Foundation released the third wave of a large national study about young people’s media use. Every day I hear parents express concerns about their teen’s media use; it seems to be the “hot-button” issue for parents today. The video below lays the problem out in black and white terms.

source

It will take some time to sort through the implications of the findings in the study and to process the issues it raises. In the meantime, parents who read this blog, our Facebook page, and are otherwise involved in our work and community want to know what to do. One thing stands out to me for those kids who are over-consuming media: Set limits. Parents need to understand you have an important role to play, particularly if your teen is not involved in a balance and range of activities.

While, as stated at the beginning of this post we don’t know that this level of media consumption is inherently bad, the study does share two important points:

 

• When parents set limits, children spend less time consuming media. Only about 30% of kids have rules about how much time they are allowed to spend with TV, video games or the computer… so parents aren’t getting involved enough in enforcing necessary balance.
• Heavy media users report getting lower grades. The study cannot establish a cause and effect correlation here, but what they do know is that almost half of “heavy” media users* usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower) compared to 23% of “light” users**.

 

Here’s some more relevant data:

 

• Today kids 8 – 18 spend an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes using entertainment media.
• When you account for their multi-tasking, they actually get 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content in those 7 1/2 hours.
• The amount of daily media consumption has gone up by over an hour in the past five years.

 

And – catch this – this study did NOT take into account the amount of time kids spend TEXTING!

There have been many interesting stories in the press over the past several days as we are all absorbing this information. It is easy to jump to premature conclusions because the figures are rather shocking. But there is another point of view: many kids are involved in media in ways that truly expand their creativity, skills and even connection with others. Ann Collier at NetFamily News offers intelligent commentary and makes several important points to consider including this:

Probably since the beginning of modern-day-style adolescence, parents have had to adjust to unnerving new kinds and uses of media, but today’s media shift is an order of magnitude different: Not only is it mobile, multimedia, multidirectional, user-produced, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one; it’s all mixed up with traditional, professionally produced media in the same “place” – the Internet, via proliferating devices – and it’s social and behavioral. It’s asking a lot of us adults, so there’s a strange need for both patience (with ourselves and each other as we adjust) and urgency (to hurry up and adjust!). There’s also a need to be alert to mass-media biases in what we read about youth and social media and open to the positive as well as negative implications.