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

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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

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 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.

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.