Nearly 80% of children between the ages of 0 and 5 who are familiar and use Internet at least once a week.
A report was released earlier this week by the education non-profit organizations Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop in the U.S., assembled by using data from seven recent studies. The study indicates that young children are increasingly consuming all types of digital media, in many cases consuming more than one type at once.
Television use, of coarse is not comparable to internet, neither in number of children who surf the web, nor the amount of time they spend on it. Most children spend at least three hours a day watching television, according to the study. Television use among preschoolers is the highest it has been in the past eight years and accounts for a whopping 47%.
Heavy television viewing may even be partially responsible for the rising number of children who use the Internet. Parents in one study indicated that more than 60% of children under age three watch video online. That percentage decreases as children get older, because school-age children have less time at home. Another study reports that 8- to 18-year-old children consume about 20% of their video content online, on cellphones, or on other portable devices like iPods, Kindles and even iPads.
A 2010 Nielsen study suggests that 36% of children between the ages of 2 and 11 use television and internet simultaneously.
Altogether, children between the ages of 8 and 10 spend about 5.5 hours each day using media.
Whether all of this screen time is good for children is not indicated by the report.
