A new study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that daily media use among children and teens has increased dramatically since 2004. In 2009, 8-18 year olds consumed an average of seven hours and 38 minutes of entertainment media a day. This is up from six hours and 21 minutes a day in 2004. The increase in media usage is driven largely by access to cell phones and iPods/MP3 players. Over the past five years, cell phone ownership among 8-18 year olds increased from 39% to 66% and iPod/MP3 player ownership increased from 18% to 76%. Activities such as social networking and high levels of media multitasking also contributed to the increase.
According to the report, the amount of time spent with mediums such as music/audio, TV content, computers, and video games increased while movies and print decreased. Print media decreased from an average of 43 minutes per day in 2004 to 38 minutes in 2009. The decrease is attributed to time spent with magazines which dropped from 14 minutes in 2004 to 9 minutes in 2009 and newspapers which dropped from 6 minutes to 3 minutes. Interestingly, the time that children and teens spend reading books has remained steady at 25 minutes per day. In addition, 8-18 year olds now spend an average of two minutes per day reading magazines and newspapers online.
