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Children spent 4 hours and a half on mobile phones

A recent research among Romanian teenagers and parents by Cult Research shows:

  • 50% of children get their first phone call between the ages of 5-9.
  • 46% get their first phone call between the ages of 10-14.
  • Children spend on screens 4.39 hours a day, while children between the ages of 10-14, 3.9 hours per day of mobile device use.
  • Teens 15-18 years old, 5 hours a day.
  • 19% of 15-18 year olds spend more than 7 hours a day on screens – almost equivalent to a day’s work.

Young people have an online world, parents don’t know it. Given the virtual world, young people end up having problems in the real world. We have this British show, Adolescence, which tells us that young people have their own online world, their parents don’t know about it, and most of the time, because of the problems in this virtual world, these young people end up having problems in the real world. Is this true? Is there a grain of truth in this show? Shall it worry us?

I observe changes in the behaviour of young people, who want and tend to engage in the same way in college, where I teach the course, a very applied course in market research, I observe changes over time.

They’re inherent anyway, and our generation was different (from the generation before us, and the generation now is different from the generations before us.

There are changes, there are changes brought by technology and not only technology, by the impact, by the influence of social media, we know this very well, it is indisputable.

In this context, I think that the phenomenon of this movie that you mentioned earlier is inherent, it will appear and it will fade away, things will not work out that way. They will not be resolved if this movie continues with the second series,

These problems that children have in their personal, private lives are often under the parental radar. As much as they think and want to be careful. So as much as parents of teenagers try to do that, they have to be aware that they’re not going to have all the details of the problem and the whole picture.

I think for many people it sounds a bit worrying to raise the issue of lack of control, if we accept that parents really don’t have access to this world. Survey data from Cult Research shows that almost half of young people, aged 5 to 14, spend a lot of time on their phones, on average four and a half hours. Kids spend more time on their phones than with their parents.

For parents it’s actually an escape into a personal time from the moment they hand over the phone to their child. If the child is on the phone, obviously depending on the age, it means free time for the parent. It means time at their own disposal. And we see it on the street, in restaurants, in different situations where children get that phone, and the parents are happily enjoying lunch or dinner. Together, they may be talking about things that are extremely important to them.

But for the child it is still a brick laid on a shaky, evolutionary foundation. As the experts say, screens in various forms – TV, phone, tablet, tablet, laptop and everything else – affect children’s minds.

Depending, of course, on their age.

I think parents are escaping into the phone given to the child. They are escaping into their own freedom of decision-making action, of discussion.

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