How much screen time is "normal"?
New data on kids' media use was just released, and I'm nerding out
Welcome to Techno Sapiens! Subscribe to join thousands of other readers and get research-backed tips for living and parenting in the digital age.
A summary for busy sapiens:
New survey data released on tween and teen media use
Tweens (8- to 12-year-olds) use over 5 hours of screen media per day
For teens (13- to 18-year-olds), that number is over 8 hours
71% of 12-year-olds own a smartphone
The majority of teens are using YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. Facebook is getting less cool by the second.
It’s a big day here at Techno Sapiens.
Every few years, the nonprofit Common Sense Media conducts a large, nationally representative survey of kids, ages 8 to 18. They ask about all kinds of tech use—social media, smartphones, gaming, TV, etc. And today, fellow techno sapiens, that data is here. This is my Super Bowl.
I’ve spent the past few days furiously combing through the report, and the results are fascinating. They’re also very useful if you’re a parent interested in how your child’s tech use compares to the average.1
Let’s dive in!
How’d they get this data?
Some quick background.
This data was collected in Fall 2021.
They also collected similar data in 2019 and 2015, so this is one of the few good surveys we have to see whether kids’ media use changed during the pandemic.
The good: A large sample of 1,306 tweens (8- to 12-year-olds) and teens (13- to 18-year-olds). It’s also nationally representative, meaning the sample roughly matches the demographic makeup of the U.S.
The not-so-good: Everything in here is self-reported, and we know that kids (and adults) are bad at estimating things like how much time they spend on their phones.2
The slightly better: Self reports on time use were done by asking kids how much time they spent on the previous day (instead of some vague “on a typical day”). This reduces some of the problems with recall and biased reporting and gives us, at least, a reasonable estimate for these numbers.
How much time are kids spending using tech?
Let’s start with this nice summary chart.3 The dark green bars show total screen time among tweens (left) and teens (right), reported in the 2021 survey. We’ll talk about the 2015 and 2019 numbers in a minute.
What’s included in this so-called “total entertainment screen use”?
TV, online videos (YouTube, TikTok), gaming (via consoles, computer, or mobile), social media, video-chatting, browsing websites, e-reading, making music, etc. Basically, anything kids might do on a device except homework.
So, it does include some things we might consider to be “better” (reading, making digital art or music, writing), though together, these activities account for less than 30 minutes.
Also, important to note that these numbers do not, necessarily, mean that kids are spending 8 out of every 24 hours using media. Because of the way the questions were asked, “multitasking” would get double (or triple) counted. For example, if a teen spends 30 minutes browsing TikTok while also watching Netflix (as kids are known to do), this would count as an hour (i.e., 30 minutes for each activity).
How much time are they spending on each activity?
The survey asks separately about daily social media (Instagram, Snapchat), online video watching (TikTok, YouTube), and gaming.
Social Media: For teens, 1 hour, 27 minutes. For tweens, 18 minutes.
Online Videos: For teens, 1 hour, 22 minutes. For tweens, 57 minutes. This is also the activity kids are most likely to say they do everyday.
Gaming: For teens, 1 hour, 46 minutes. For tweens, 1 hour, 27 minutes.
Did screen time increase during the pandemic?
Yes. Yes it did. This graph helps us visualize it.
For both tweens and teens, daily screen time increased 17% in just two years (2019 to 2021). This is a larger increase than what we saw in the prior four years (2015 to 2019).
The increase was driven mostly by more time using social media, browsing websites, video-chatting (for tweens), and watching online videos (for teens).
Which platforms are teens using?
When teens were asked which platforms they “ever use,” the top five were what we’d expect: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook.
YouTube is, by far, the most popular. 83% of teens use it.
The next three are basically tied for second. 70% of teens use Instagram, 68% use TikTok, and 64% use Snapchat.
Facebook, used by only 40%, is seemingly becoming lamer by the second. And Twitter (just 22%) is the social media equivalent of your parents stopping by the middle school cafeteria just to “say hi.” So embarrassing.
Who has a phone?
Another very handy figure. The dark green line at the top shows us the percent of kids at each age who have their own smartphone, according to the 2021 survey.
71% of 12-year-olds have a phone
91% of 14-year-olds have a phone
You might be wondering what’s going on with 11-year-olds who, suddenly, in 2021 appear to be significantly less likely to have a phone than in prior years. I reached out to ask Mike Robb, Common Sense’s director of research, and he was kind enough to write back right away. It seems like this may just be some noise in the data. It’s certainly possible that, compared to prior years, parents are getting their kids phones a little earlier (see: ownership at ages 8, 9, and 10). It’s also possible that—as can happen with random samples—the 11-year-olds that ended up in the 2021 survey were just an unusually phone-less bunch. We’ll have to wait for the next round of data to find out.
And finally, are kids living in the future?
Not yet. The survey asks about virtual reality and the results are…meh.
Only 22% of tweens and 27% of teens have ever tried virtual reality.
For comparison, nearly double that number (46%) of teens say they’ve listened to a podcast, and 20% listen at least once a week.
Only 17% of kids report that their households own a VR headset.
Only 13% of kids say they enjoy using VR “a lot” or “somewhat.” This is slightly higher among boys (17%), likely due to more frequent gaming.
My Takeaway
These screen time numbers are high. There’s no getting around it. As I mentioned, some of this may be due to “double-counting” media activities kids are doing at the same time, but at the end of the day, it’s still a lot. These numbers have also increased during the pandemic, which will come as a surprise to exactly no one.
So, now what?
As we begin to see life returning back to (the new) normal, with in-person activities slowly resuming, it might be a good time to take stock of tech habits—for ourselves, and for our kids.
Is lots of screen time bad? Not necessarily.
But it’s a good time to ask ourselves some questions about that screen time. What are kids doing with that time? What are they looking at, posting, watching? How is it making them feel? And what could they be doing instead?
Looking for strategies to manage screen time in your family? Try problem-solving or a tech vacation (and let me know how it goes!)
A quick survey
What did you think of this week’s Techno Sapiens? Your feedback helps me make this better. Thanks!
The Best | Great | Good | Meh | The Worst
The title of today’s post asks how much screen time is “normal.” The quotes here are important. I do think it’s useful to get a sense for, on average, how tweens and teens used technology during the pandemic. What’s not useful, though, is to take these numbers as gospel. If your child is using more or less media, or different kinds of media, from the “average”…well, that’s just how averages work, and that’s okay. Also, just because something is average doesn’t mean it’s good. Another “average” thing that happened during the pandemic was that more than 60 million households watched Tiger King. Was that good for us? Maybe not.
A logical question is whether, when people self-report their screen time, do they underestimate or overestimate? The best evidence we have comes from this meta-analysis, which compares self-reported screen time with actual logs (from the Screen Time app, for example) across 47 studies. Unfortunately, the answer is not clear. It seems that there may be a slight bias for over-reporting (i.e., saying we spend more time using screens than we actually do), but it’s not a very strong effect, so we can’t be sure. From the authors: The evidence is insufficient to conclude whether estimates are typically under- or over-reported compared to logs of media use. Likely, it’s a combination: some people underestimate, and some people overestimate. More on this in a future post.
During the pandemic did our screen time to up again? Was it a permanent bump? Why do they say digital transformation accelerated 10 years in 2?
Do these numbers include screen time at school or for virtual learning? If 8 hours includes the 3-4 hours a kid in on their laptop doing schoolwork, that reduces the "shock" quite a bit for me.