Which Probably Leaves Less Time for Reading

Kids Study: More Media Use at a Younger Age. (Click Z, 5/10/2011)

Excerpt:   They're crawling to the TV set and toddling to the laptop. A new study of kids' media use finds that even the preschool set is logging on.

For its 2011 LMX Family study, Ipsos OTX MediaCT surveyed 2,080 American parents and their kids aged six to 12, as well as 715 parents of preschoolers aged 0 to five about the children's attitudes to media and their usage.

They found that most children are media consumers by the time they're a year old. And, by the time they've barely stopped toddling, they're interacting with video on their own.

More than half of the parents of preschoolers said their kids would be allowed to play games on mobile phones or consoles, watch online video and listen to music on multiple devices when they were five years old. By age six, they'll be allowed to go online on their own.

Traditionalists will be pleased to see that kids aged five and younger enjoyed playing with toys and playing outside as much as they did watching TV or video. For six- to 12-year-olds, more than one quarter of the time they were awake was screen time. Moreover, their media time rose substantially in the past year, from 4.9 hours to 5.3 hours each day, thanks mostly to video games.