It is common to hear parents and adults in general say that today’s children spend their days in front of screens . Interestingly, many of them also spent hours and hours in front of screens such as the television or the video game console on duty when they were children. But the years change us and generational differences make us forget that we were all children at one time, and that the adults of that time criticized our habits . Yesterday it was the Game Boy, today it is the TikTok videos, the Fortnite games or the Twitch broadcasts.
Be that as it may, today’s children have access to entertainment that did not exist in our age as minors. And in many cases, either we do not know them or they do not interest us. Worst of all, we probably don’t even understand them. But as parents or guardians we have no choice but to know the habits of our children . Poland Email Address
To help us, Qustodio has prepared a complete analysis of the digital habits of minors . Their findings are based on anonymous interviews with 100,000 families with children between the ages of 4 and 15 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. And among the questions, one of the topics covered has to do with social networks, one of the elements that today’s children spend more time on.
Social media and children in
You may have a profile on Facebook and Instagram . Surely you use WhatsApp . Maybe you even take a look at Twitter or Pinterest . But, what social networks are your children favorite? Is it true that each social network has different user profiles by age ?
According to a report prepared by Qustodio , a company specialized in parental control and digital habits of families and minors, the Internet habits of today’s children differ somewhat from our habits. Still, there are some coincidences. For example, YouTube is the most widely used video application, despite the fact that the competition is gradually gaining ground.
Regarding social media, the report makes some shocking conclusions. For example, “children spent 76% more time on social media in 2020 than in 2019.” Obviously, these data have a context, the coronavirus pandemic that forced entire families to stay in their homes for a long time
More interesting facts. ” TikTok consolidates its leadership in the social media market: it already surpasses Facebook and Instagram in popularity , and children have used it 97% more this year than in 2019.” In addition, ” Facebook has recovered a good part of its popularity among the youngest, but they continue to spend an average of 60 more minutes a day” to watch TikTok videos .
Along with Zoom , another communication application that has gained relevance among children and young people is Discord . It is a service to talk on the Internet, especially while playing online. An ideal complement for multiplayer games such as Fortnite or Among Us and that, according to the Qustodio study , mobile lead “the popularity of Discord as a communication application increased 92% among children
The most popular social networks among young audiences
TikTok is the most popular social network among the youngest users. An undeniable superiority throughout the world. In second and third place we find Facebook and Instagram , which exchange their position depending on the country surveyed. The fourth most popular social network is SnapChat .
And now that we know the ranking of the favorite social networks, it is convenient to know an equally or more important fact: how much time do minors spend on social networks? According to the Qustodio report , Spanish children spend an average of 65 minutes watching TikTok videos a day. American children, meanwhile, go up to 87 minutes. As a curiosity, that time of use is, in both cases, double in 2020 than in 2019.
Instagram is also the favorite of your children, with an average of 63 minutes a day of attention. At a distance, Facebook , with 29 minutes, Pinterest with 16, Snapchat with 14 or Twitter with 12 minutes a day. And how are those hours distributed in the day?
According to the study, “before the pandemic, children used social networks mainly after school , between three and eight in the afternoon. After the mobility restrictions were established, this five-hour window was extended and children began to use these platforms intensively over a period of 13 hours, from ten in the morning to eleven at night ” . Come on, mobility limitations increased activities such as watching TikTok, Instagram or YouTube videos.
