Introduction

For 8-18 year olds, an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes is taken up daily by entertainment media, such as TV and DVD watching, computer and video games, surfing the web, texting and listening to music, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation. They go on to say that during this 7 1/2 hour time, children are actually fitting in a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media usage because they are using more than one media activity at a time, they are multitasking with media. Every single day is consumed by that much media for children and that adds up to over 53 hours a week! Thats a full time job, except they are not doing anything productive. What are children spending their time doing? As shown they are wasting their time with plenty of media. With school being part of their day and sleeping part of the day that doesn't leave much time for homework, family time or even exercising. With all this usage of media are children taking care of their bodies? In today's world children's time is being consumed by media which in turn is affecting their health. Parents need to realize what their children are spending their time doing. Not only what children are doing, but what their child is missing and what all this time spent on media is replacing. Physical activity is being cut out of children's lives because children can no longer find time to do it. This media usage is taking so much time out of their lives that they feel the least important thing to squeeze in there is exercising, so they don't. The increase of media usage is replacing some of the time that could be spent in physical activity which in turn is effecting children's health, for the bad.