Youth plugged in nearly most of the day: study

January 20, 2010 10:15 PM EST

The amount of time youngsters are spending on the web has ballooned to proportions that exceed the average adults full working week, according to a new study.

Young people now devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to daily media use, or about 53 hours a week according to Kaiser Family Foundation findings released today.

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The media use -- including watching TV, playing video games, and surfing the Internet -- is increasing as more gadgets emerge to keep kids more connected than ever.

A few years ago, the same researchers thought that teens and tweens were consuming about as much media as possible in the hours available. But now they've have found a way to pack in even more.

America's 8- to 18-year-olds increased their consumption of digital media over the past 5 years by one hour, 17 minutes a day, the study found.

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"When children are spending this much time doing anything, we need to understand how it's affecting them -- for good and bad," Drew Altman, president and chief executive of the foundation, said in a statement.

The report, "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-year-olds," is based on a survey of more than 2,000 students nationwide.

It is the third wave of the nonprofit's ongoing look at children's media use, providing a glimpse at current viewing and listening patterns while also documenting changes from five and 10 years ago.

This article is copyrighted by International Business Times, the business news leader