Prevention Matters

A new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that kids spend more than 71/2 hours a day with electronic media, up from about six hours in 1999.

Most young people have a cellphone and an iPod — and nearly one in three own a laptop computer."Heavy media users" - those who consume more than 16 hours of media content in a typical day, are more likely to have bad grades, more likely to be "often sad or unhappy," less likely to get along well with their parents and twice as likely to "get into trouble a lot." Even so, heavy users were more likely to say they have "a lot of friends."