Clock it is Friend of Time

Those ages 8 to 18 devote more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not figure out the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they order off on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.

“I feel like my days would be wearying without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his adept phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

The burn the midnight oil’s findings shocked its authors, who had concluded in 2005 that use could not possibly grow further, and confirmed the fears of many parents whose children are constantly tethered to media devices. It found, moreover, that lowering media use is associated with several negatives, including behavior problems and lower grades.

The third in a series, the study found that under age people’s media consumption grew far more in the last five years than from 1999 to 2004, as sophisticated mobile technology like iPods and shrewd phones brought media access into teenagers’ pockets and beds.

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Nursing home Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to a standstill arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they pledge and the food they eat.”