Kids spend 7+ hours a day on consoles and phones

A study produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation has shown that American children aged 8-18 spend some 7.5 hours per day on “entertainment media”.

In other words, playing on consoles, with their smartphones, computers, digital audio players and other such devices.

The figure is up from 6 hours 20 minutes, which is the level the Foundation recorded in research carried out five years ago.

However, because kids tend to multi-task media – using two mediums at the same time – the Foundation reckons they actually manage to “pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those 7.5 hours.”

“The amount of time young people spend with media has grown to where it’s even more than a full-time work week,” said Drew Altman, CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“When children are spending this much time doing anything, we need to understand how it’s affecting them – for good and bad.”

And it seems school grades are affected for the worse. Of heavy media users, 47% said they usually only get fair or poor grades. When it came to light users, only a quarter said they got fair or poor marks.