Parenting Guide

Studies show Gen X more addicted to social media than Gen Y

Published by SchoolAdvisor | Feb 03, 2017

Time for millennials to feel vindicated.

  Millennials get a lot of flak for their social media use. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat – they’ve all been used in the media to characterize the millennial generation as self-centered and image-obsessed. However, that might not be the case anymore. A recent report from Nielsen; a company that studies consumers in in more than 100 countries to view complete trends and habits worldwide, says that Millennials are not the most social media-addicted generation. That ignominious award actually goes to the generation ahead of them, Generation X.

Nielsen defined Generation X as anyone between the ages of 35 to 49, while Millennials were people aged 18 to 34. They found that Gen Xers actually spend 39 more minutes on social media per week than Millenniials. In total, that’s just under 7 hours spent on social media per week for people between 35 and 49.

Generation X also spends more time on media in general, consuming some form of media for 32 hours per week, while Millennials only consume around 27 hours in the same amount of time.

All around us, We see Generation X (parents) with their babies and toddlers and young kids — but not with them. The grownups are on the phone. The dad pushing his son on the swing set while hands-free on his mobile isn’t really with his child. The mom pushing her baby in a pram while she’s yakking on the phone isn’t really with her child.

Younger kids especially do take notice and they're not too happy about it. They’re pulling on their parents’ clothes. They’re yanking on their arms. They’re acting out to get attention. You've probably heard them begging their parents to stop, disconnect. A child sees his father on the phone most of the time and he understands that his father can never get away from his work — and the office won’t get away from his father. He sees the phone, and he thinks, I’ve lost my dad’s attention. And that’s what children crave: attention. We all do.

Sean Casey, the president of Nielsen’s social division, who wrote the foreword to the report, which was released on Jan. 17, said that the finding had initially surprised him, because “the going thought is that social is vastly owned by the younger generation.”

“It’s kind of synonymous,” he said. “When you think of millennials, you think of social.”

Mr. Casey, 46, said that eventually, the finding started to make more sense to him.

“Our generation was really the first adult generation to grow up with Facebook,” he said. “At a time when we wanted to be connected, it came out right when we were at the top of our media consumption. Its become second nature to our generation.”

The 29-page report was based on data from 9,000 smartphone and 1,300 tablet users from across the country from July through September. The data was not self-reported.

The report also broke out which social networks were most popular on smartphones, finding that Facebook still ruled the roost on mobile, with about 178.2 million unique users in September. It was followed by Instagram with 91.5 million unique users, Twitter, with 82.2 million unique users and Pinterest, with 69.6 million users.

Despite the hype, Snapchat, a favourite of younger users, was sixth on the list, behind the professional networking site LinkedIn.

Finally, the report looked at second-screen activity on social media, measuring how many times Facebook and Twitter users used those sites to post or tweet about programmes that they were watching, or interact with others’ posts and tweets.

Again, in this category, it was Generation X that couldn’t look away from its device screens: On an average day, the report found that 42 per cent of those interacting with television on Facebook were 35 to 49, while only 40 per cent of millennials were doing the same thing.

Parents have to break their phone habits before its too late. We're not talking  about getting extreme here — no phone calls around a child, ever. But rather, we're talking about giving more thought to all the missed opportunities for communicating with a child. For simply being with them.

One day, sooner than you realize, you will be with your child, wanting to talk. But she’ll be too busy. Talking to someone who isn’t there. And why not? You weren’t there when she was.