A Day in the Life of a Teen

Many days, I am on the road at the time when the most amount of people are trying to either get to work or come home. I usually don't get a chance to have normal dinnertime as I sit in the car moving from place to place. By not being there during group meals, I feel that I am missing something. Three is a concept called the "opportunity cost" where if you spend more of your time doing X there is less time for you to do Y. Thus, whatever activity "Y" it would suffer because you don't spend also of your time on it. So, you're always in a sense of keeping everything moving so both activities have enough time applied with it to keep making progress. Thus, it is the life of a working parent to continually ensure both X and Y get as much time as possible to keep the whole world spinning.

I head upstairs and check in with the kids. I ask, "How are you doing?" before heading off to grab some food and watch TV. Usually, the report is "Fine." and that's about it. Teenagers aren't known for their long-winded talking, just giving the parents enough information, but not a bunch of personal details.

I always wonder what my kids are up to. Are they getting their homework done? What's going on in their lives? Do they have enough time away from the computer or mobile phone? I know the hour is late, so I at l

At the Pew Research Center, they started to look at how teens are spending their time.

As you can see with the graphic on the right, teens are spending more of their time sleeping and doing homework and less time working for money and socializing.

"Teens are also getting more shut-eye than they did in the past. They are clocking an average of over nine and a half hours of sleep a night, an increase of 22 minutes compared with teens a decade ago and almost an hour more than those in the mid-1990s. Sleep patterns fluctuate quite a bit – on weekends, teens average about 11 hours, while on weekdays they typically get just over nine hours a night.


Teens now enjoy more than five and a half hours of leisure a day (5 hours, 44 minutes). The biggest chunk of teens’ daily leisure time is spent on screens: 3 hours and 4 minutes on average. This figure, which can include time spent gaming, surfing the web, watching videos and watching TV, has held steady over the past decade. On weekends, screen time increases to almost four hours a day (3 hours, 53 minutes), and on weekdays teens are spending 2 hours and 44 minutes on screens. Over the past decade, the time spent socializing – including attending parties, extracurriculars, sporting or other entertainment events as well as spending time with others in person or on the phone – has dropped by 16 minutes, to 1 hour and 13 minutes a day. Teens also are spending less time on paid work during the school year than their predecessors: 26 minutes a day, on average, compared with 49 minutes about a decade ago and 57 minutes in the mid-1990s.

Boys also spend more time playing sports: 59 minutes vs. 33 minutes for girls.


Teen girls also spend more time than boys on grooming activities, such as bathing, getting dressed, getting haircuts, and other activities related to their hygiene and appearance. Girls spend an average of about an hour a day on these types of tasks (1 hour, 3 minutes); boys spend 40 minutes on them.

Girls also devote 21 more minutes a day to homework than boys do – 71 minutes vs. 50 minutes, on average, during the school year. This pattern has held steady over the past decade, as the amount of time spent on homework has risen equally for boys and girls.
"Teenage Girls Spend 38 minutes a day, on average, helping around the house during the school year, compared with 24 minutes a day for boys. The bulk of this gap is driven by the fact that girls spend more than twice as much time cleaning up and preparing food as boys do (29 minutes vs. 12 minutes). There are no significant differences in the number of time boys and girls spend on home maintenance and lawn care" link:  https://pewrsr.ch/2GQ44jn


The original article (from Pew Research) is located here: https://pewrsr.ch/2GQ44jn

That's all for the blog today! Thank you for reading! If you have any questions, please let me know.