Examining Media Use by Tweens and Teens

As a youth librarian in a public library, I work closely with tweens and teens and often see them in a more "natural" environment than other adults in their life--say, parents or teachers--usually would. Our teens generally view the library as a place of leisure rather than education, so that type of environment naturally elicits a different response from them. After school, I often see teens engaging, either independently or in groups, with social media apps such as TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, video game systems, and--believe it or not--schoolwork! The school district our kids are zoned for distributes an iPad to each student, so occasionally we will see someone pull theirs out to work on classwork after school.

At the same time, I'm also in the unique situation of having more frequent exposure with parents and caregivers of these children. Parents often come into the library to pick their child up, or accompany them to pick out books or attend programs. As librarians, these caregivers (hopefully!) view us as sources of reliable information, so it's not surprising that parents have asked us about media literacy and the risks of media use for their teenagers. These questions don't solely exist within the realm of technology; just as often, I'm asked if a certain book on our shelves is appropriate content for a child of a certain age. I try and treat media and technology questions the same way, or direct them to reliable resources about media use in teens. However, it's useful as a librarian dealing with teens to know exactly what kind of trends are taking place in the world of media use by teens.

To familiarize myself with the media landscape teens experience, I consulted the Common Sense Media Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens (2021). For this post, I'll be including some of the infographs included in their own report summary to support my findings. Their top statistic is overall screen use trends: according to their findings, daily screen time by tweens and teens is up a whopping 17% from 2019, two years prior to the report's publishing. Alone this number may seem shocking, but Common Sense mentions throughout the report that this uptick in screen time is due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Image source: Common Sense Media

Another glaring statistic was screen use broken down by household income. See the graph included below.

Average daily entertainment screen use, 2021

Image source: Common Sense Media

This was a surprising statistic to me, as we often see a "digital divide" occurring between lower and higher income households. This assumption is supported by a later statistic in the report, showing that lower-income households are 27% less likely to have a computer in the home. With phones and tablets generally being cheaper and more accessible for tweens and teens, this trend shouldn't be as surprising as it is; with a lack of computers in the home, kids are more likely to turn to phones and tablets (either their own or their parents') for entertainment. Smart phones are much cheaper and more accessible than they were even four years ago, when the 2019 data was pulled, so we should expect to see the digital divide for phones and tablets to be closing considerably over the coming years.

Overall this was an enlightening report on screen use for teens and tweens. I like that the statistics were all broken down by age group (tweens versus teens) so you can see how the data differs. Other interesting differences came from gender (boys having higher screen use than girls) and race (Black and Hispanic/Latino having higher screen use than white). This is great information to know for interactions with both children and parents in the library, and I'm interested to see what their next report on media use in youth will look like!