This is an intriguing statistic, though not necessarily surprising... According to a new report from Northwestern University, minority children spend a crapload of time -- an average of 13 hours a day -- with their eyeballs glued to mobile devices, computers, TV and other media. That's about 4.5 hours more than white kids: Minority kids spend most of their waking hours plugged in.And leading the pack, with the most media use: Asian American kids, of course, logging 13 hours, 13 minutes a day. We win, followed by Hispanics (13 hours), blacks (12 hours, 59 minutes), and whites (8 hours, 36 minutes.) So how do you explain the disparity? Some experts have a few ideas:
"Children may turn to media if they feel their neighborhoods lack safe places to play or if their parents have especially demanding jobs that prevent engagement," says Frederick Zimmerman, chair of the department of Health Services at UCLA School of Public Health.Like I said, not surprising. Kids are using a hell of a lot of media. In addition, depending on the primary medium involved, as many as 47% of kids in all groups that most of the time they multi-task with another type of media. From all this, I can only come to one conclusion: I am a kid. Because I do all these things too.
"It's clear that, overall, American youth spend an enormous amount of time with media, but minorities spend most of their waking hours with media," says study director Ellen Wartella, head of the Center on Media and Human Development in the School of Communication at Northwestern.
The report shows that compared with white children, minority youth:
- Watch TV and videos one to two hours more a day;
- Listen to music about an hour more a day;
- Use computers about 1.5 hours more a day;
- Play video games 30 to 40 minutes longer a day.
Black (84%) and Hispanic kids (77%) also are more likely to have TVs in their bedrooms and to eat meals in front of the TV.
Sometimes, I fear a future like the one in Pixar's Wall-E, where our bodies devolve into fleshy, blobby piles, moving from place to place in personal transportation devices and communicating to one another only through screens, having forgotten how to interact face to face. Watch out, kids! You're the future.