The amount of time children are spending on electronic devices is greater during the COVID-19 pandemic than before, according to a children’s screen time report from Morning Consult.
The organization offers many measures digging into this unsurprising conclusion. The survey – based on input from 899 US parents collected in mid-August – found that before the pandemic about 60% of children spent three hours or less each day using their devices. During the pandemic, 70% said that their kids spend four hours or more “with screens.”
Screen-based activities dominated both education and entertainment. “Games were the most prevalent type of content children interacted with, according to parent reporting: 70 percent of U.S. parents overall, as well as 84 percent of parents with a child between the ages of 5 and 12 and 80 percent of parents with teens ages 13 to 17, said their kids played games while using their devices,” the blog post on the research said. “School assignments and homework were also activities kids ages 5 or older interacted with frequently.”
Across all age groups, games and its 70% share was followed by school/homework (58%), social media (49%), movies (46%), TV shows (43%) and chats/meetings including Zoom (39%).
The survey also looked at precisely what the kids consumed. Across all age groups, the leading sources include:
- YouTube (62%)
- Netflix (55%)
- Disney+ (35%)
- Disney Channel (24%)
- YouTube Kids (23%)
- Instagram (22%)
- TikTok (21%)
Minecraft (20%)
Nickelodeon (18%) - Fortnite (18%)
- PBS Kids (16%)
- Cartoon Network (16%)
- Roblox (15%)
- Twitter (12%)
- Amazon FreeTime (9%)
- Noggin (3%).
Even the youngest children are logging more screen time, the research found. The percentage of children under five years of age who use devices an hour or less was cut in half – from 28% pre-pandemic to 14% now – as the percentage of children under five with two to three hours of screen time increased from 28% to 42%.