| total media use is directly linked with tv in bedroom |
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Kids less happy as they're more plugged into TV, music, Web? - USATODAY.comClipped from: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-01-20-kidsmediauseinside20_st_N.htm |
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| TV: Impairs speech | Leads to earlier sex |
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The freshman at North Carolina's High Point University says she and her friends have "six or seven ways" to get in touch most days: cellphone, texting, instant messaging, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and Skype videoconferencing.
"I'm probably on my computer four hours out of the day, doing different stuff for school or talking to people," says DeWitt, 18, who, for all her connectivity, turns out to be a "light" media user: A new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that kids spend more than 71/2 hours a day with electronic media, up from about six hours in 1999.
Most young people have a cellphone and an iPod — and nearly one in three own a laptop computer.
But the survey also reveals that the more media they use, the less happy young people tend to be.
Heavy media users, it finds, are more likely to have bad grades, more likely to be "often sad or unhappy," less likely to get along well with their parents and twice as likely to "get into trouble a lot."
What's a "heavy media user"? A child who consumes more than 16 hours of media content in a typical day, according to the study. A "light user" consumes fewer than three hours of media.
Actually, the findings present a sort of chicken-and-egg scenario: Does consuming a lot of media make children's lives more troubled, or do troubled kids simply consume more media?
Interviews with parents, media experts and a handful of teens suggest it's a bit of both. In the end, a simple answer seems elusive.
Perhaps it's that heavy media users have fewer friends? Actually, they're more likely to say they have "a lot of friends" — 93% vs. 91% for other kids.
Perhaps they don't get enough exercise? Actually, the survey shows, they somehow cram more physical activity into their days than others — just short of two hours, compared with 1 hour and 44 minutes for light media users.
"It's really creating a different mode of experiencing childhood," says Karen Sternheimer, a sociologist at the University of Southern California. "We don't really know what the endgame is, and that's what makes people nervous."
Fitting in or tuning out?
Think it's just young people whose happiness splits along these lines? Not so, she says. "My guess is that we're going to find really similar results for adults, too — the happiness issue for adults might even be bigger."
Omead Kohanteb, 18, a freshman at the University of California-Berkeley, says Facebook and cellphones have made it easy for him to fit in on campus and make friends: He estimates that 99% of students have cellphones: "Everyone I've met has one."
But media can just as easily create a wall, says 14-year-old Morgan Sosic, a freshman at Orange High School near Cleveland. She has an iPod loaded with her favorite bands — Never Shout Never, Alesana and Stephen Jerzak, among others — and says popping in earbuds while she's riding the school bus is the perfect way to tell people to, in so many words, Go away.
"It's 6 a.m. and you don't want anybody bothering you," she says. "People know not to talk to you."
The media/happiness connection "makes a lot of sense to me, actually," she says. Kids who seem more isolated are "way into their music and all that kind of stuff."
But just because young people listen to a lot of music doesn't mean they're unhappy, she says. "I'll always just keep my music on while I'm studying or doing my homework."
Look for balance
Chelsea Yeh, 17, a senior at Brea Olinda High School in Brea, Calif., says: "I think it depends on the person." If people are using media "to pursue their passions," it can be a positive thing.
"There has to be a balance," says Paul Caputo, a father of three boys in Ashland, Pa. "Technology is great, but the balance is that you need to have face-to-face communication. You need to maintain relationships beyond a computer screen or text message."
Kaiser's Vicky Rideout cautions not to read too much into the findings and says media use "is not inherently bad or good." She notes, for instance, that music in a teen's life "can be incredibly inspirational."
But she says media sends young people "a nearly constant stream of messages" about just about everything in their lives: parents, clothes, food, sex, love relationships. The happiness findings, she says, are "certainly something for us to look at."
DeWitt, the North Carolina college freshman, says she can see how someone wrapped up with pastimes like Facebook could become blue.
"With technology, if you're trying to get a response from someone, there are so many ways you can get rejected," she says. "There's more opportunities to get bad news."
Then again, when she's unhappy, she turns to Facebook.
"I know if I'm having a bad day, I can just look at my friends' Facebook pictures — we have a whole album of when we've gone on a trip or something like that — and just smile."
READERS: Do you think electronic media affects your happiness? What about your children's? Are time or content limits the way to go?
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