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By Douglas McCulloch
Hometown Weekly Staff
A fifth grade class at the Deerfield School was recently given an assignment to write a persuasive essay arguing a particular side of a controversial issue.
The students were required to research the issue online, develop arguments to support their position, and address potential counter-arguments that could arise from their points.
The students submitted their essays to the Hometown Weekly in the hopes of seeing their essays published.
For the next several weeks, we will be publishing several essays, chosen at random, to highlight the accomplishments of the talented writers who submitted letters to the Hometown Weekly.
The third essay picked, written Connor Long, argues that kids should spend less time in front of electronic devices.
Kids should spend less time on entertainment media
By Connor Long
Picture this: You find that your child is having problems with eating and attention, and you’re wondering why. Then, your child brings back a D- on a test. They seem to be on their computers all the time, and they say they are learning, but their grades are dropping dramatically. Why is this happening, you wonder.
If your son or daughter has bad grades or problem with attention, sleeping, eating or other issues, you should probably know this: Kids spend way too much time on entertainment media. This includes TV, iPods, the Internet and video games, which for some adds up to 7.5 hours of entertainment media each day.
During that time, many kids “media multitask,” which means that they use more than one screen, so they need to manage to cram 10.75 hours of entertainment media into just 7.5 hours. All of this is not needed and is caused by too much time on entertainment media. Kids should spend less time on entertainment media.
First of all, kids between the ages of 8 to 18 that spend 7.5 hours of entertainment media every day are really unproductive. On average, kids spend 7.5 hours a day on entertainment media which includes TV, Facebook, Instagram, video games and more, while they only squeeze in an average of 38 minutes of reading every day.
That also means that kids spend well over half of the time they are awake involved with entertainment media. Also, on average, children spend more time on entertainment media than they spend in school, sleeping, eating or even with their own family. Have you ever thought about that?
Almost half of children in a recent survey (43 percent) considered themselves heavy media users and had grades of mostly C’s or lower. Only 25 percent of children considered themselves light media users.
Another concern is the rules that kids have over entertainment media. Fewer than half of all 8-18 year olds say that they have restrictions on what TV shows they are allowed to watch, less than 30 percent on what games they can play, and half on what they can do on the computer. Think about how much more productive kids could be if they had used all that 7.5 hours on doing something more productive.
In addition to children earning themselves bad grades and being extremely unproductive, kids who spend more time with media devices have a lower personal contentment, and have a chance to get in trouble more often. Media can also lead to difficulties in areas such as school, attention, sleep, eating and more.
These disorders can lead to obesity and risky behaviors. Continuing with the huge worrying trend is that according to Kids’ Health, a child who watches more TV has a higher chance of being overweight. Each hour of television watching can result in a 7 percent decrease in classroom engagement, and a 13 percent decrease in weekly physical activity.
Around 50 years ago, the information or data that most children received was primarily from family and friends, but that has been drastically overtaken by the amount of entertainment media they are exposed to. The number of people who read a newspaper daily has dropped tremendously from 42 percent in 1999 to 23 percent now
Also, kids spend an average of 53 hours a week on entertainment media, which is way too much. That amount of time is over two whole days of a week being spent on entertainment media. Typically, this is equivalent to time being spent alone, rather than being social and interacting with others. Instead of talking face-to-face and being social with others, teenagers in grades 7-12 spend over an hour and a half just texting back and forth. Does it make you wonder if children are missing out on developing their social skills?
Some people could be thinking that so much nowadays depends on computers, and people every day use computers to work, from computer scientists all the way to middle school students, but I disagree. In my opinion, kids are not using computers appropriately. Kids use them like they are toys.
They do things that are unnecessary, unlike adults who need them for work. Many kids don’t need them, that is for sure. They don’t need them like adults do. Kids are getting less face-to-face socialization by themselves. Kids cannot stop using them improperly and kids should do things more productive.
Imagine, a world of much healthier children: playing outside, reading, learning, better grades, eating better, sleeping well at night, and being able to pay better attention.
Imagine a world where your child would not play video games unless you let them. Imagine no frustrating arguments between you and your child over computer usage, or worrying that they are getting their eyes glued to the TV screen. Imagine you’re a kid playing outside with real friends.
Computer usage has grown to an unnecessary level and adults should do more to help stop allowing kids to spend so much of their time easy day on entertainment media.
