This report follows an important one the Kaiser Family Foundation did in October, 2009. That report showed that the barrage of digital medical begins as early as six months to two years of age.

No one has any way of knowing what this means in terms of child development but there is an urgent need to understand its effects.

Now the foundation tells us that kids are media multi-taskers—using a laptop and an iPod at the same time, for instance—so that they spend more time using entertainment media than their parents spend working.

“Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Foundation about young people’s media use. It includes data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004, and 2009), and is among the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information about media use among American youth,” says the Kaiser news release.

Seventy percent of kids don’t have limits set by parents. “Only about three in ten young people say they have rules about how much time they can spend watching TV (28%) or playing video games (30%), and 36% say the same about using the computer. But when parents do set limits, children spend less time with media: those with any media rules consume nearly 3 hours less media per day (2:52) than those with no rules.”

Heavy media users report getting lower grades. While the study cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, there are differences between heavy and light media users in this regard. About half (47%) of heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23%) of light users. These differences may or may not be influenced by their media use patterns. (Heavy users are the 21% of young people who consume more than 16 hours of media a day, and light users are the 17% of young people who consume less than 3 hours of media a day.)

Finally, black and Hispanic kids are heavier users.

Kaiser Family Foundation

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation Report, January 20, 2010, Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds