The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens [downloadable]

The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021 from Common Sense Media examines kids’ media use during the pandemic and compares the numbers to previous years. Common Sense learned that media use has grown faster since the start of the pandemic — over a two-year period — than it has over the four years prior to the pandemic. But this report goes a few steps further by exploring the content behind those numbers: how kids are spending that time, and which media activities they enjoy most.

The results present an opportunity for parents and caregivers to think differently about how they establish healthy boundaries in a world where media use is higher than ever — and with no sign of the trend changing. But this data is also a call for policymakers to take action on legislation that will make media use safe, healthy, and engaging for kids everywhere.

Selected Findings

In the past two years, media use for tweens and teens grew faster than in the four years before the pandemic.
As you might expect, the time spent on screens by kids age 8–18 is a lot higher today than before the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2021, the total amount of screen media used each day went from 4:44 to 5:33 among tweens, and from 7:22 to 8:39 among teens. That’s a 17% increase in the last two years — and it doesn’t include screen time while learning at school or doing homework.

Some have expected that a return to in-person school and regular extracurricular activities will reverse this trend, but it hasn’t thus far. Others believe the rising trend will continue, or that the pandemic simply brought on the inevitable. Either way, we will continue to monitor trends in media use, especially as we move into a new phase of the pandemic.

Online video has emerged as the activity of choice for tweens and teens, and YouTube is the must-have platform.
More than 6 in 10 tweens and teens watch online videos every day, and say they enjoy watching “a lot,” far more than the percent who enjoy any other media activity that much. And this cuts across different groups. Watching online videos is the activity enjoyed the most among boys and girls, kids who are White, Black, and Hispanic/Latino, and those in lower-, middle-, and higher-income households.

Where are kids going to watch videos? Among the 79% of 13- to 18-year-olds who are regular users of social media and online videos (viewing at least once a week), 83% have used YouTube, and 68% have used TikTok. And nearly a third of kids (32%) age 8–18 say YouTube is the one site they wouldn’t want to “live without.”

The number of tweens using social media — before they’re technically old enough to do so — is climbing.
Social media use by tweens climbed during the pandemic, with the percentage of 8- to 12-year-olds reporting that they had ever used some form of social media jumping to 38% in 2021, compared with 31% in 2019. Plus, the time spent using social media is up eight minutes a day among this age group, from 10 to 18 minutes a day, on average. When you zoom in on the 22% of tweens who used social media on the target day we asked about, the average time jumps to 1:20.

Considering tweens aren’t technically allowed to be on social media platforms at all, this growth in use should be concerning for advocates for safe, healthy social media platforms.

Media use continues to reflect gender differences, as well as racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences.
Screen time has risen across the board, but what we’ve seen consistently each time we complete the Census is higher media use by boys, and higher use within communities of color and lower-income households. We can’t say from this data why this disparity occurs, or whether it has positive or negative effects on young people. But the disparities persist and are substantial:

• Boys use more screen media than girls (76 minutes a day more, on average, among tweens, and 74 more among teens).
• Black and Hispanic/Latino children use more screen media than White children (for example, a difference of about two hours [1:57] a day between Black and White tweens, and two and a half hours [2:31] a day between Hispanic/Latino and White tweens).
• Tweens and teens in lower-income households engage with substantially more screen media (9:19) than their peers in higher-income households (7:16).

Excerpted from “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens” from Common Sense Media. Read or download the full report.

Source: Common Sense Media | The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/the-common-sense-census-media-use-by-tweens-and-teens-2021 | © Common Sense Media 2022

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