Family Life

01.20.10 | FL News Team

Fiddling with electronic media could very well be a full-time job for many young Americans. A new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids between the ages of eight and 18 spend an average of seven hours and 38 minutes each day on activities like surfing the web, chatting on cell phones, listening to music and playing video games. That figures out to more than 53 hours a week. The numbers are almost a third higher for African-American and Hispanic children than their white peers. Kids back in 1999 spent only six hours and 19 minutes a day on electronic entertainment. Now, young people get about 20-percent of their media from mobile devices, and they're twice as likely to juggle more than one tech-related task at a time than kids a decade ago. The survey of just over two-thousand young people also found that magazine and newspaper readership have each fallen by about 20 percent since 1999. Kids' daily book readership has stayed around 47 percent.