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Nielson Report: Kids’ TV use at an 8-year high - 2-5 year olds now watch 32 hours of TV per week

By: NWHF Staff | Posted on: October 30th, 2009 | 1 comments | Share:
Categories: Education • Public Health • Did You Know?

New data from television monitoring group Nielsen indicates that each week children on average spend more than 28 hours per week watching TV, representing an eight-year high for television viewing among children. Based on an analysis of live and recorded TV viewing, and DVD, VCR and video game usage, children ages 2- 5 watch television more than 32 hours per week, averaging nearly four hours per day.

Children ages 6- 11 watch an average of about 3 1/2 hours per day.

Younger kids (2-5) also watch more commercials than the older group.

The older kids however, spend twice as much time playing video games — 2 1/2 hours compared to 1 1/4 hours for those 2-5.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time for children younger than age 2 and no more than two hours per day for children older than 2 years of age.

Vic Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine commented that “the media are one of the most powerful teachers of children that we know of. When we in this society do a bad job of educating kids about sex and drugs, the media pick up the slack”

Professor Strasburger said it pretty well, but the point was summed up even more powerfully by Banlin Garcia, a 16-year old at Centennial High School in Hillsboro, Oregon, who won second prize in the 2009 Public Health Photo Contest sponsored by CHP in the picture seen here.

Banlin entitled her photo “Are you my mother?”

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