Kids and Media at the New Millennium

This landmark study provides an unprecedented snapshot of how American children and adolescents were engaging with media at the turn of the millennium, capturing a pivotal moment before smartphones and social media transformed the landscape. Drawing from comprehensive data on over 3,000 children aged 2 to 18, the report meticulously documents the "almost continual diet" of audiovisual content that defined young people's daily lives, offering a crucial baseline for understanding media consumption patterns. It systematically analyzes the media environment and habits across this wide age range, providing a detailed portrait of a generation growing up with rapidly expanding access to on-demand entertainment.

What makes this research invaluable is its scale and timing, creating an essential historical record against which all subsequent digital media studies can be measured. The findings serve as a critical reference point for educators, parents, and policymakers seeking to understand how media saturation has evolved over decades. For anyone researching the long-term effects of screen time or the transformation of childhood in the digital age, this work provides the foundational data that continues to inform our understanding of youth and media relationships today.