CANBERRA, Nov 19 (Bernama-Xinhua) — Australian research reveals a dramatic rise in social media use among children and teens, with daily users soaring by more than 200 per cent from 2019 to 2022, reported Xinhua.
University of South Australia (UniSA) researchers tracked more than 14,000 South Australian students aged 11-14 from 2019 to 2022, uncovering a dramatic shift in how young people spend their time, according to a UniSA news release on Wednesday.
Over the four years, daily social media use jumped from 26 per cent to 85.4 per cent, and non-users plummeted from 30.6 per cent to 2.6 per cent, while participation in sport, reading, music and art has sharply declined, according to the study published in JAMA Network Open.
The share of children who never read for fun rose from 10.8 per cent to 52.6 per cent, while those not involved in art activities increased from 25.7 per cent to 70.4 per cent, it said.
“There’s no doubt that social media has become deeply embedded in children’s daily lives,” replacing activities that support healthy development, said UniSA researcher Mi Zhou, one of the study’s corresponding authors.
The findings come as Australia prepares to implement a nation-leading restriction on social media access for children under 16, providing an essential baseline for evaluating how such interventions affect young people’s after-school activity patterns.
— BERNAMA-XINHUA