Data from The Joan Ganz Cooney Center showed that
parents believe their children are spending more time each day on mobile
devices, but learning more from television. The parents reported their kids
spend 2.5 hours each day on screen-based devices, but time with educational
material decreases as children get older.
The study found that toddlers spent one hour and 16 minutes each day playing with
educational media, but that kids ages 8-10 spent just 42 minutes a day doing so.
The report added that most of those 42 minutes were in front of a television.
Parents also said 52% of the TV programming their children
watched was educational, while just 36% of their time spent on mobile devices was
for educational purposes. Nearly 57% of the parents said all education media
did help for subjects such as math and reading, but those same parents were not
as confident about the value of educational media when it came to the arts and
sciences.
“Most parents don’t consider television or interactive
digital media such as computers, video games, and mobile devices to be very
important sources of learning,” the authors of the report wrote.
