8-18 Year-olds Average 7 hrs 38 minutes Daily to Entertainment Media

Yes, it’s true, 8-18 year-olds average 7 hrs and 38 minutes per day consuming entertainment media. Do those numbers sound high? They should. Because today’s average daily media consumption in the lives of 8-18 year-olds has increased by over an hour per day since the last study 5 years ago.

7 hours and 38 minutes is the brand new total released just TODAY from the Kaiser Family Foundation that you’ll be seeing quoted in reports everywhere for the next 5+ years. The report is called Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year-Olds.

Five years ago Kaiser released their March 2005 report, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds. Since then, the Journal of Pediatrics, Pew Internet, CNN… EVERYONE… have used those numbers in their own reports about young people and media consumption.

Well… the new numbers are in. And media consumption is way up across the board. (Duh!)

This Sunday David and I will release our article with the summary of these findings in our weekly Youth Culture Window article. For those who want to get a sneak peak at the full Kaiser report, click here. Here’s some of what you’ll find:

Check out that increase in just the last 5 years!

Wow… kids are really reading that print-media, huh!  🙂

That’s just a snippet. You’ll also learn fun tidbits from the full report like the fact that cell phone talking and texting is NOT counted as media use (page 18, paragraph 2). That’s right, on top of the average of 7 hours and 38 minutes that young people spend per day in the above activities, there is also texting and talking on the phone.

• 11-14 year olds spend an average of 1 hour and 13 minutes per day texting, and 36 minutes per day talking.
• 15-18 year-olds spend an average of 1 hour and 51 minutes per day texting, and 43 minutes per day talking.

Add those numbers to 7 hours 38 minutes!

I’ve been looking forward to this report for a while now. Last week, Amanda Lenhart from Pew Internet told me that it was coming out today. (Another fascinating conversation… I had emailed her because I saw a report released from an organization I won’t name, a report that said that young people were spending 2.5 to 3.2 hours a day online. I read these reports all the time and that sounded high. A similar Nielsen report showed young people- depending on age- only spent a little over an hour per day. That’s an hour to two hours per day different! After examining both reports, I feared that this “un-named” organization was doing an internet survey. Think about that for a moment. “Let’s use the internet to poll people on the internet how often they are on the internet!”  🙂  Sure enough, my guess was correct. But I also emailed Amanda- I really respect her research– and asked her as a third party what she thought. She basically said, “Let’s see what Kaiser says next week!” Sure enough, this new report released today only reveals an average of 1 hour and 29 minutes of daily internet time.)

Again, we’ll give you the full summary next week on our Youth Culture Window page. But for those who have time, I really encourage you to read Kaiser’s full report. Just glimpse at some of their charts. Fascinating stuff about this young generation and their love for media.