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Comment by kailuowang | Hacker News Reader

400 hrs of commercials a year? How much TV are these kids watching a day?

According to [1] the average US adult watches 4 hours 10 minutes of live TV per day. Personally that comes as a surprise to me - but I would expect Nielsen to know a thing or two about surveying TV viewership.

[1] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2018/time-flies-...

Wow. I thought the amount of time I spend with The Office reruns in the background on Netflix was bad, but it's nowhere near 4 hours bad.

I mean, is it bad? This is everyone I know back home. They go to work, come home, eat, and watch TV. It's a life. It's not for me, but like, what else are they going to do with their time? I could make a bunch of value-judgement statements like "they should read a book!" or "they should learn python!" but like, why? Who cares? They don't have ambitions beyond a comfortable life.

Just as my life is not for them, their life is not for me. At least they have some way to entertain themselves, whereas every second I spend relaxing comes with anxiety over whether I'm spending my time "usefully."

> I mean, is it bad? This is everyone I know back home. They go to work, come home, eat, and watch TV. It's a life.

If you believe your origin and your destiny are agent-less and meaningless, then it makes the most sense to call everything in the middle meaningless also. Thus - eat, drink, watch TV, have fun till it's over. I can see that making sense.

But if life and its pursuits have any shred of meaning, then I think it's OK to say they could be doing better things with their time.

+1. Very nicely said. Thank you for this

You and I agree, for our own lives. I derive meaning from my agency.

For some reason, though, there are a shitload of people out there that don't have this ambition. I understand difficulty empathizing with it, because to people like you and me it does look like a "waste of time." But for some reason it really is just ideal for a lot of people to be able to switch their brain off and sit comfortably in front of a TV and be entertained.

For these people, you could argue "you should be doing something better with your time," but all you'd get back is "why? This is comfortable."

The article claims nearly 4.5 hours per day. I find that hard to believe... I don't know any children (in my admittedly biased sample) that watch more than an hour or two.

I know families who literally leave a tv on for the kids 24/7. It's on during meals, it's on during the day, it's there as they are getting ready for bed. Just constantly on and droning away.

I cannot understand that behavior. Even an hour or two a day seems like a lot for a kid to me.

Sometimes having an hour of time to yourself while your kids are watching TV is a huge boon.

3:30pm-7:00pm -- homework + tv (mostly tv) OR practice.

7:00pm-8:00pm -- dinner with the family (during tv, possibly)

8:00pm-11:00pm -- homework + tv (mostly tv)

11:00pm-1:00am -- tv

---

Even including sports practice, we've cracked over five hours, and that's from when I was in grade school.

It's interesting to me that you would stay up until 1 am as a grade schooler. That is quite late

I pulled all-nighters in grade school to maximize my media intake (in this case browsing message boards) while still getting homework done.

Guessing kids these days do the same to stay on top of snap, insta, tiktok, reddit, etc.

Not suprising to be honest. In middleschool and highschool I would stay up even later. Wake up for school at 7, get there by 8, class till 3, after school activity till 5 or 6, done with dinner by 7, two hours or so of half assed work (takes longer the more half assed), then 9 o clock would signal that the rest of the day belonged solely to me and my interests, and I would be on the laptop or play video games untill whenever I got tired. Usually I'd clock around 5-6 hours a night of sleep during the week, and make it up by sleeping close to 10 on the weekends.

College set me straight with sleeping, though. I was able to schedule classes no earlier than 10:30, and if I went out late into the night and got hammered I could sleep in on a whim without consequence. I was also able to have nap time again. Definitely struggled getting sleep with a full time job now, but its been getting better. Everyone where I work has their own schedules. Couple of us are here at 7, me and others don't get in till 10-10:30. Sometimes I work till 7, most of the time I leave by 5, and sometimes I leave at 3. Rigidity kills the soul.

I probably watched more than that growing up so ymmv. I always wonder how they collect statistics like these. Questionnaires / self reporting by parents?

They install tracking boxes in the TV's of a sample of the population. This is done with the family authorization and often they get compensated for it. There's a lot of work that goes into choosing the sample so it's representative of the total population.

Source: a friend that worked in the field.

I was a Nielsen subject on multiple occasions and it depended entirely on self reporting via a paper questionnaire.

They probably aren't literally watching the TV the whole time.

Some parents have the TV on in the background but the children are distracted with other tasks.

For example, I will watch the news while my daughter plays in the same room doing her own thing.

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