ARE KIDS WATCHING TOO MUCH TV? AVERAGE CHILD SPENDS A `WORKWEEK' WITH MEDIA.

Byline: Marla Matzer Rose Staff Writer

With more media and more gadgets than ever, American kids are spending the equivalent of a full workweek in their leisure time - 38 hours - consuming TV, video games, movies, music and print media, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study released Wednesday.

A typical child between ages 2 to 18 spends 5.5 hours per day with various media. Television accounts for half of the time or two hours, 46 minutes. Listening to recorded music and reading are a distant second and third. Surprisingly, given parents' concern about the Internet, kids spend just eight minutes a day online.

And despite the fact that most parents say they are ``very concerned'' about the amount of media their children are consuming, 61 percent of children said their parents had set no rules about watching television.

Other highlights of this study:

32 percent of children today live in homes with at least four TV sets; by contrast, only 35 percent of homes had more than one TV set in 1970.

African-American and Latino children spend an average of almost an hour more per day using media, especially television, than white children.

In an encouraging note, 82 percent of kids say they read for fun each day - an average of 44 minutes.

In single-parent homes, children are more likely to have a TV in their bedroom, spend more time watching TV and are less likely to have rules about their TV viewing.

Nearly one-third of children 7 or younger and two-thirds of older children have a TV in their bedroom, and most have multimedia rooms.

Parents said they feel overwhelmed by trying to monitor what their kids are watching and listening to.

Peter Oden, a salesman and father of two children who attend Reseda Elementary, admitted his kids love video games and have TVs and stereos in their rooms. But he said he tries to set boundaries by making them do their homework without distractions as soon as they get home, and keeping them from seeing R- and some PG-13 rated movies.

``You have to have control of your children; talk to them, and try to be around,'' Oden said.

It appears that the main reason many kids watch TV is simply because it's there: 99 percent of households have TVs, vs. the 69 percent of homes that have computers and the 45 percent that have Internet access.

Most kids said if they were forced to choose between only a computer or a television, they would choose the computer. Among those children who use a computer, the usage was high: an average of one hour, 26 minutes among all children, with 8- to 18-year-olds spending nearly 1-3/4 hours on the computer each day.

The report by the Menlo Park, Ca.-based Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health care philanthropy (unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente), is one of the most comprehensive public studies ever conducted of media use by youths. The report studied 3,000 children from across the country.

Vicky Rideout, director of the foundation's Program on the Entertainment Media and Public Health, said the study was ``about collecting data, not about making value judgments.'' It does not address impact or causality of high media use, for example.

The foundation, which previously studied sex and violence in the media, found that sexual content on television is up significantly, and teens get more sex information from TV than from any other source.

Rideout said kids who say they are ``heavy'' media users - the 16 percent of 8- to 18-year-olds who spend more than 10.5 hours a day using media - are more likely to have fewer friends and less likely to be contented with their lives.

Parents and educators of media-saturated kids, though, said they're more concerned about the quality than the quantity of media their kids are consuming.

``Chris likes the Discovery Channel, the Cooking Channel, all kinds of offbeat things that I think he really learns from,'' said Tina Froehler, the West Hills mother of 15-year-old Chris Froehler. The teen-ager has two televisions, two video game systems and a stereo in his bedroom.

Tina Froehler said she and her three siblings grew up with just one television they fought over, but she doesn't worry that her son is being spoiled or distracted.

``He's got a B average. He plays the guitar. He's really a good kid,'' she said.

Rosemarie Kubena, the principal of Reseda Elementary School and an educator for the past 20 years, emphasized that ``the media can be positive . . . You can use TV as a benefit, if you watch it and talk about it as a family.''

On the other hand, said Kubena, who is the mother of two,``It's easy to sit a child down in front of the TV when you're tired and busy.''

More than one-third of parents of 2- to 7-year-olds said TV is on ``most of the time'' and nearly half say it's usually on during meals. Meanwhile, parents watch TV with their young children just 19 percent of the time, the study found.

Rideout said though the report doesn't address parental responsibility per se, a majority of parents who say they're very concerned about their children's use of the media can use the study to limit their kids' time with the media.

``First and foremost, get the media out of the bedroom if you're concerned about it,'' Rideout said. ``Don't have the TV on during meals. Don't have it on when no one's watching. You have to take control.''

But Victoria Tamayo, a health care worker from Reseda, expressed a common frustration among parents who feel they're losing the battle of policing their kids' use of the media. ``I won't buy albums with the parental advisory stickers,'' Tamayo said, ``But I know he gets them. He borrows them from friends.''

CAPTION(S):

photo, box, chart

Photo: (color) Fifteen-year-old Chris Froehler plays a video game Wednesday while watching a movie in the bedroom of his home in West Hills.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer

Box: What kids do

Chart: Home vs. bedroom