A tracking census found pandemic-era screen time jumped fastest

The short answer

Common Sense Media's Census of tweens and teens, 2021 found that non-school screen media use grew faster in the two pandemic years than in the four years before them. It tracks the same measure across waves, so its main value is the comparison over time, not any single year's total.

What the evidence says

The report is a nationally representative, probability-based online survey of 1,306 young people aged 8 to 18 in the United States, run by Ipsos Public Affairs for Common Sense Media, fielded from 29 September to 25 October 2021. It measures entertainment screen media only, meaning time spent on television, online video, gaming, social media, browsing and similar activities outside school or homework use. Between 2019 and 2021, average daily use rose from 4 hours 44 minutes to 5 hours 33 minutes among 8- to 12-year-olds, and from 7 hours 22 minutes to 8 hours 39 minutes among 13- to 18-year-olds, a far larger jump than the 2015-to-2019 period. The census also found lower-income and Black and Hispanic tween and teen households reporting more daily screen media than higher-income and white households.

For context

Definitions moved between waves: the 2021 survey counted e-book reading in the total for the first time and dropped a small iPod Touch category, so year-to-year totals are not a perfectly like-for-like comparison. This series runs alongside a separate Common Sense census of younger children aged zero to eight; its 2025 edition, the fifth in that younger-child series, found daily screen time roughly steady at 2.5 hours but a marked shift in what children do with it, with gaming time up 65% in four years as short-form video largely on YouTube and TikTok has grown. Together the two series show that a stable headline number for one age group can still sit alongside real change in a different age group.

A practical next step

Instead of comparing your family's screen time to a single national average, you could use the census's own measure, entertainment media outside school and homework, to check what you are actually counting before deciding whether a number feels high or low for your household.

• Does our family's estimate of screen time include or exclude schoolwork done on a device, and does that match how the census measures it?
• Has what our children do with their screen time shifted, even if the total hours have not?
• Do income or access pressures at home shape our children's media use in ways a national average would not show?

A recurring census like this one is most useful for spotting direction and pace of change rather than pinning an exact number on any one household, and its own methodology notes are worth checking before a figure is repeated as settled fact.