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Teen Media Consumption — Hours Per Day

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About This MicroSim

This chart shows how the average US high school student (grades 9–12) distributes their daily entertainment screen time across eight media categories. The data represents hours per day of leisure consumption — it excludes school, homework, and video calling.

Use the All Teens / Boys / Girls toggle to compare how media habits differ by gender. The most dramatic difference is in video gaming (boys average more than six times as many hours as girls) and short-form video (girls spend about 60% more time on TikTok and Reels than boys).

How to Use

  1. Read the chart from top to bottom — bars are ordered by category, not by time spent.
  2. Click Boys or Girls to switch the dataset and compare the distributions.
  3. Hover over any bar to see the time expressed as hours and minutes per day.
  4. Return to All Teens to see the overall average.

Discussion Questions

  • Which media category surprises you most? Does your own daily use match the average?
  • Short-form video (TikTok / Reels) is a newer format than traditional TV — yet teens spend more time on it. What does that suggest about how media habits are changing?
  • Reading (books and print) is the smallest category. How might this affect the literacy skills discussed in Chapter 1 of this course?
  • The gender gap in gaming is larger than the gender gap in any other category. Why might that be, and is it changing?

Lesson Plan

Grade Level

9–12 (High School English / Language Arts)

Duration

10–15 minutes (can be extended to 30 min with discussion)

Learning Objectives

Students will be able to: - Read and interpret a horizontal bar chart showing time-use data. - Compare media consumption patterns across demographic groups. - Connect quantitative data about reading habits to course themes about literacy and text engagement.

Prerequisites

  • Ability to read a bar chart
  • Familiarity with the media types named (TikTok, YouTube, streaming services)

Activities

  1. Predict first (2 min): Before revealing the chart, ask students to write down their guess for the top three time categories. Compare guesses to the actual data.
  2. Explore (5 min): Students interact with the chart individually, toggling between All Teens, Boys, and Girls. Each student notes the single finding that surprises them most.
  3. Discuss (5–10 min): Use the discussion questions above. For ELA connection, focus on the reading bar and what it implies about who the course's skills are competing with for student attention.
  4. Writing prompt (optional, 10 min): "Based on this data, write a one-paragraph argument about whether high school students are reading enough — and what, if anything, schools or students themselves should do about it."

Assessment

  • Can the student accurately read a value off the horizontal axis?
  • Can the student articulate one meaningful comparison between the Boys and Girls datasets?
  • (Writing prompt, if used) Does the student's argument make a clear claim supported by at least one data point from the chart?

Iframe Embed Code

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References

The data in this MicroSim is drawn from the following authoritative sources. All figures represent entertainment screen time (leisure use only; school and homework excluded) for US teens ages 13–18 unless otherwise noted.

  1. Common Sense Media. The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2023. Common Sense Media, October 2023. The most comprehensive annual survey of US youth media use. The 2023 edition surveyed 1,623 young people ages 8–18. Key findings include overall daily screen-time averages and breakdowns by gender, race/ethnicity, age group, and socioeconomic status. All per-category hour estimates in this MicroSim are derived from this report. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/the-common-sense-census-media-use-by-tweens-and-teens-2023

  2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. American Time Use Survey (ATUS), 2022 Results. BLS, June 2023. The ATUS is the federal government's authoritative dataset on how Americans age 15 and older allocate their waking hours. The 2022 release includes reading-for-leisure time estimates disaggregated by age group, corroborating the Common Sense Media reading figures. https://www.bls.gov/tus/

  3. Rideout, Victoria, Susannah Fox, and Supriya Pai. Constant Companion: A Week in the Life of a Young Person's Smartphone Use. Common Sense Media, 2023. A diary-based companion study to the Census that tracks minute-by-minute smartphone use across a full week for a subsample of teens. Provides granular data on app switching and the blurred boundaries between categories (e.g., TikTok used for music as well as video). https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/constant-companion

  4. Pew Research Center. Teens, Social Media, and Technology 2023. Pew Research Center, December 2023. National survey of 1,453 US teens ages 13–17. Reports platform-by-platform usage rates (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook) and daily time-on-platform estimates. Cross-references and validates the social media and short-form video figures used here. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social-media-and-technology-2023/

  5. National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy. NEA Research Report, 2009; updated tracking in How a Nation Engages with Art, 2012. Longitudinal NEA data on reading-for-pleasure trends among Americans ages 18+. While not teen-specific, provides historical baseline against which current teen reading figures can be compared, showing a long-term decline in leisure reading since the late 1980s. https://www.arts.gov/impact/research/publications/reading-rise

  6. Anderson, Monica, and Jingjing Jiang. Teens' Social Media Habits and Experiences. Pew Research Center, November 2018. Earlier Pew benchmark study useful for longitudinal comparison; documents the rise of YouTube as teens' dominant platform prior to TikTok's US growth. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/11/28/teens-social-media-habits-and-experiences/