If I have not yet seen you around campus, Happy New Year and welcome back! As Amy Broberg and others work hard to build enrollment at BCD, and because our blog is accessible to and read by many prospective families, please take a minute to reply to the post on our main blog – “Tell Us About Your Child’s Teachers.” Thank you to everyone who is participating in our 1:1 campaign this year.
I offer two more resources for parents this week. I have added a link on the left side of my blog called “Resources for Parents.” The first is a link to Common Sense Media, a website company. They are “dedicated to improving the media and entertainment lives of kids and families and exist because media and entertainment profoundly impact the social, emotional, and physical development of our nation’s children. As a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization, we provide trustworthy information and tools, as well as an independent forum, so that families can have a choice and a voice about the media they consume.”
The latest “from my bookshelf” is:
The authors (Levin is a professor of education; Kilbourne, an authority on the effects of advertising) accuse the media of sexualizing children. Constantly, American children are exposed to a barrage of sexual images in television, movies, music and the Internet. They are taught young that buying certain clothes, consuming brand-name soft drinks and owning the right possessions will make them sexy and cool—and being sexy and cool is the most important thing. Young men and women are spoon-fed images that equate sex with violence, paint women as sexually subservient to men and encourage hooking up rather than meaningful connections. The result is that kids are having sex younger and with more partners than ever before. Eating disorders and body image issues are common as early as grade school. Levin and Kilbourne stress that there is nothing wrong with a young person’s natural sexual awakening, but it is wrong to allow a young person’s sexuality to be hijacked by corporations who want them as customers. The authors offer advice on how parents can limit children’s exposure to commercialized sex, and how parents can engage kids in constructive, age-appropriate conversation about sex and the media. One need only read the authors’ anecdotes to see why this book is relevant. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
This is an important book to be read by all parents of girls. If you haven’t seen the ad campaign by Dove, please look it up. They’ve created two public service spots that have been circulated on the web throughout the world.
One is titled “Transformation,” the other, “Onslaught.” Both are powerful commentaries
about the exploitaion of girls, and the expectations of how ‘beauty’ is defined. The media plays a huge role in how girls are sexualized. Jeane Kilborne is a major voice, and supports the Dove Self Esteem Fund. Education, can make a difference. Thank you, Paul, for recommending the book,and raising awareness about this topic.
As i work closely with Nielsen(media research) I see a lot of data about media usage…This report was the most comprehensive (and shocking to me) data I have seen on children and media usage:
I will try and give you a top line summary:
Kids Pack 10 3/4 Hours Of Media Content Into 7 1/2 Hours Every Day
According to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, eight-to-eighteen year-olds spend an average of more than 71/2 hours a day, seven days a week with media. The aim (of this study), says Kaiser, is to provide a more solid base from which to examine media’s effects on children, and to help guide those who are proactively using media to inform and educate America’s youth.
Five years ago, Kaiser reported that young people spent an average of nearly 61/2 hours a day with media, and managed to pack more than 81/2 hours worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people’s lives were filled to the bursting point with media.
As of today, says the report, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38, almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five.
And, given the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time, today’s youth pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those daily 71/2 hours, an increase of almost 21/4 hours of media exposure per day over the past five years.
2.Use of every type of media has increased over the past 10 years, with the exception of reading. But breaking out different types of print does uncover some statistically significant trends. For example, time spent reading magazines dropped from 14 to 9 minutes a day over the past five years, and time spent reading newspapers went down from 6 minutes a day to 3; but time spent reading books remained steady, and actually increased slightly over the past 10 years (from 21 to 25 minutes a day).
3. Today, 20% of media consumption (2:07) occurs on mobile devices, cell phones, iPods or handheld video game players. Almost another hour consists of “old” content, TV or music, delivered through “new” pathways on a computer.
The development of mobile media has allowed young people to find even more opportunities throughout the day for using media, actually expanding the number of hours when they can consume media, often while on the go. Over the past five years, the proportion of 8- to 18-yearolds who own their own cell phone has grown from about four in ten, to about two-thirds. The proportion with iPods or other MP3 players increased even more dramatically, jumping from 18% to 76% among all 8- to 18-year-olds.
4. Eight- to eighteen-year-olds today spend an average of a half-hour a day talking on their cell phones, and an average of 49 minutes a day listening to, playing or watching other media on their phones, while 7th- to 12th-graders spend 1 ½ hours a day text messaging (time spent texting is not included in the count of media use, nor is time spent talking on a cell phone in the study).
For the first time since this research began in 1999, the amount of time young people spend watching regularly scheduled programming on a television set, at the time it is originally broadcast, has declined by :25 a day but the proliferation of new ways to consume TV content has actually led to an increase of 38 minutes of daily TV consumption.
The increase includes:
24 minutes a day watching TV or movies on the Internet
15 minutes each watching on cell phones and iPods
59% of young people’s TV watching occurs on a TV set at the time the programming is originally broadcast
41% is either time-shifted, or occurs on a platform other than a TV set
In the last five years, home Internet access has expanded to 84% among young people; the proportion with a laptop has grown from 29%; and Internet access in the bedroom has jumped to 33%. The quality of Internet access has improved as well, with high-speed access increasing from 31% to 59%.
5….This was really interesting stuff:
For purposes of comparison, young people were grouped into categories of heavy, moderate and light media users:
Heavy users are those who consume more than 16 hours of media content in a typical day (21% of all 8- to 18?year?olds);
Moderate users are those who consume from 3-16 hours of content (63%)
Light users are those who consume less than three hours of media in a typical day (17%)
Nearly half of all heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly C’s or lower), compared to 1/4 of light media users. Heavy media users are also more likely to say they get into trouble a lot, are often sad or unhappy, and are often bored.
6When young people hit the 11- to 14-year-old age group there is an increase of more than three hours a day in time spent with media and an increase of four hours a day in total media exposure. Just as children begin to make the transition into adolescence, their media use explodes, notes the report.
Eleven- to fourteen-year-olds average just under nine hours of media use a day, and, with multitasking. have nearly 12 hours of media exposure
The biggest increases are in TV and video game use, with11- to 14-year-olds consuming an average of five hours a day of TV and movie content, and spend nearly an hour and a half a day (1:25) playing video games.
The report concludes that understanding the role of media in young people’s lives is essential for those concerned about promoting the healthy development of children and adolescents, including parents, pediatricians, policymakers, children’s advocates, educators, and public health groups. The purpose of this study, say the authors, is to foster that understanding by providing data about young people’s media use.
Parents need to toughen up…
Children who live in homes that impose some type of media-related rules, spend substantially less time with media than do children with more media-lenient parents.
Sorry for this long email…I thought you should know the latest stats…..