Families Opt for Internet - Over Food, Family Time?

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.” Deut. 6:4-8

From the Baptist Press –
Quick question: During the current economic recession is your family more reluctant to cut back of the grocery bill or the Internet bill?

In a survey of 500 British families, the internet got priority over food, and it wasn’t even close. The survey by the British internet provider O2 showed that given several options, 67% of families were more reluctant to cut back on their internet bill than they were on school uniforms (59%), family vacations (30%), and the weekly grocery bill (24%).

The survey, O2 said in a release, provides insight into “what is regarded as essential and what is regarded as discretionary” spending by modern British families. But American families might agree too, according to a recent survey by the Center for the Digital Future at the U.S.C. Annenberg School for Communications. That June poll shows that as household internet usage has increased, family time has decreased.

According to the U.S.C. Annenberg survey of 2,000 US households, the percentage of people who say they spend less time with household members since being connected to the internet grew from 11% in 2006 to 28% in 2008. The total hours per month devoted to family time had changed too, from an average of 26 hours per month during the middle of the decade to 17.9 hours per month in 2008.

Over the same period, reports of family members feeling ignored by members using the internet grew 40%. Women (49.2%) were more likely than men (39.1%) to report being ignored.

Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they had concerns about the amount of time children and teens within the household spend online, compared to 11% who answered similarly in 2000.

The British survey found that 15% of parents reported that “at lest one of us, is always working at home outside normal working hours.”

Michael Gilbert, a senior fellow at the Center for the Digital Future, noted that families have survived past new technologies, including the telephone and television, but that the internet “delivers an engrossing interactive universe into our homes and demands much greater individual commitment.”

“The family is our social foundation, society’s basic building block,” he said. “We need to guard its health in what otherwise seems to be a boundless digital future.”