Teens staring at screens for 10 hours a day

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Teenagers spend 10 hours a day staring at a screen of some sort, according to a new survey.

Despite the proliferation of shiny new digital toys like mobile phones and handheld gaming consoles, teenagers are still most likely to be found parked in front of the TV. They spend an average of 19 hours a week there, according to the survey of 3,000 teens by npower.

It's not all being lazy, however. During school, teens will be in front of a computer for three hours and 44 minutes on average. In what some will see as misspent time, the kids of today are getting good training for office careers, as they're spending 90 minutes of that work time on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

They spend another 38 minutes playing games or browsing the web, and teens spend 49 minutes texting each other. Video game consoles make up another hour of their busy days, as does fiddling with handheld devices like consoles and MP3 players.

Education programme director at npower Clare McDougall said you'd expect kids to be outside during the summer. "But the lure of technology has made it harder to get young people to switch off," she said in a statement. "Whether they're on the bus, at home or in the back of the car these days kids look for every opportunity to tune into technology."

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