It’s screen time: digital consumption of U.S. children
From school to home, digital devices have become more and more part of childhood, with the time spent in front of screens by children being an increasingly problematic and worrisome issue for parents. According to a survey of parents in the United States, around 47 percent of respondents allowed over three hours of screen time to children daily in 2022. While TV and video gaming occupy U.S. children the most, browsing websites and engaging with social media occupied users for 24 minutes and 18 minutes per day, respectively. In 2021, U.S. parents reporting to be very or extremely concerned about their children’s device usage were 29 percent, while around 18 percent of parents in the United Kingdom reported the same level of concern.With the increase in ownership of affordable mobile devices, mobile apps have become a stable interactive point between children and online environments. From video to social media and education, the app market provides several popular products children want to engage with while using their smartphones.
How much time do children spend using mobile apps?
In 2021, children in the U.S. spent over one hour daily using the YouTube app, as well as around 49 minutes on the Netflix app consuming video content. Short-video sensation TikTok and photo-sharing app Snapchat were the social media apps recording the highest time spent among children in 2021, with 99 minutes and 84 minutes of daily engagement each. In comparison, gamified learning environments such as Kahoot! and Duolingo only saw around 16 minutes and 12 minutes of daily engagements from U.S. kids, respectively. Gaming, which was estimated by 67 percent of U.S. parents to be one of the internet activities their children partake in, saw high engagement levels, with the Roblox app recording around three hours of daily time spent playing among kids in 2021, up by 80 minutes from the previous year.Young users protection and mobile parental controls
As for grownups, app usage in children does not come without several possible privacy risks. Being a more vulnerable category of users on the internet, children in the U.S. have been put at the center of several pieces of legislation to protect their online privacy as well as regulate or ban the use of their personal data. Passed first in 1998, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was drafted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to monitor digital companies and enforce the requirements set to protect users under 13 years of age.In recent years, parents and institutions have been quick to realize that mobile app tracking could potentially exploit children’s data for monetary purposes, and social media usage exposes children to more potential risks. Between 2020 and 2021, the share of parents who reported checking the websites and the apps their child uses has increased from 78 percent to 84 percent, signaling a more rigorous approach to technology and a deeper understanding of the problematics associated with the internet usage in minors.
While legislators have been exercising top-down pressure to monitor companies, families have found an unexpected ally in parental control apps. Parental control software companies have been increasingly developing mobile applications to monitor children’s screen time and online interactions, as well as blocking access to unsafe websites. Revenues of the leading parenting and parental control apps for the U.S. market experienced an increase during the third quarter of 2021, with mobile app Boop Kids generating over one million U.S. dollars in the examined quarter. The global parenting app market is projected to reach almost 800 million U.S. dollars by 2028, an increase of 67 percent from the estimated revenues generated in 2021.
