How Much Time Are Your Kids Online?

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The answer is that kids between the ages of 8 and 18 are using media approximately 7 and half hours a day, which is up since the last time this study was done five years ago.

At that time, researchers thought that teens’ media usage was at an all-time high at 5 hours a day. But, today’s technology is increasingly mobile. It can, and does, go anywhere that kids go. The breakfast table. The car. The park. Kids don’t have to plant their butts in front of the TV or the desktop computer to be plugged in.

The mobility of media means that kids are constantly connected, which is how they are spending almost 1/2 of their waking day online. And they’re not just plugged in—they’re using multiple media simultaneously.

Kids today are the ultimate multi-taskers: walking and texting. Listening and surfing. Gaming and chatting. Watching and texting.

For tween and teens, technology is ubiquitous.

It’s au courant.

It’s also problematic.

It can lead to obesity. It can cause social disconnection, focus issues, and dangerous online habits. And, most importantly, it can cause communication problems in the classroom.

Whether you are a supporter of teens’ usage of technology, or worried about potential impact it might have on users, one thing is sure: the techno-savvy teen generation is raising a lot of very important questions about how media usage is changing the way that we think and learn, both in and out of the classroom.