PARENTING

How much time do kids spend on devices – playing games, watching videos, texting and using the phone? Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. How many hours does the average American spend on devices each year? – Maxwell P., age 10 Think about your favorite devices – your smartphone, laptop, tablet, computer or console – the things you use to play cool games, watch hilarious videos and connect and chat with friends. Many young people spend a lot of free time looking at them. Turns out that teens spend an average of 8½ hours on screens per day, and tweens – that’s ages 8 to 12 – are not far behind, at 5½ hours daily. Keep in mind those numbers are for only social media, ga...

4 reasons teens take part in social media challenges. Social media challenges are wide-ranging – both in the stunts they involve and the reasons why people do them. But why do young people take up challenges that pose a threat to health, well-being and, occasionally, their very lives? We are an engineering professor who specializes in understanding how humans interact with computers and a psychology professor with expertise in mental health, specifically traumatic stress and suicide. Together with our research team, we conducted a series of studies to try to understand what motivates teens and young adults to participate in different challenges. For these studies, from January 2019 to January 2020, we interviewed dozens of high school and college students in both the United States and sout...

Online predators target children’s webcams, study finds. There has been a tenfold increase in sexual abuse imagery created with webcams and other recording devices worldwide since 2019, according to the the Internet Watch Foundation. Social media sites and chatrooms are the most common methods used to facilitate contact with kids, and abuse occurs both online and offline. Increasingly, predators are using advances in technology to engage in technology-facilitated sexual abuse. Once having gained access to a child’s webcam, a predator can use it to record, produce and distribute child pornography. We are criminologists who study cybercrime and cybersecurity. Our current research examines the methods online predators use to compromise children’s webcams. To do this, we posed online as chi...