These days, screens of one kind or another occupy youth for 50 hours a week, a 2010 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation reports. "It's a full-time job plus 10 hours of overtime, and that's the average," said Douglas Gentile, a psychologist and director of the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University.
Video-gaming consumed nine weekly hours for teens, the Kaiser survey found, while a Harris Poll conducted for Gentile during the same period reported 13 hours a week spent gaming on computers and consoles.
While some kids can shoot 'em up for hours, for others, too much time gaming leads to poor school performance. Recent studies have finally linked the cause and effect, showing that gaming displaces after-school academic activities such as homework and reading. A 2010 study from researchers at Denison University in Ohio, published in the journal Psychological Science, compared two groups of boys that had never owned gaming systems. They gave one group a system right away, but withheld games from the other group for four months. Boys who received the video-game system first had more teacher-reported learning problems and significantly lower reading and writing scores than the other boys.
Problems in school are relatively easy for parents to fix: Limit screen time — of course, if you can get the controller out of his or her hands. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than one to two hours per day in front of any electronics. Today:1
