Trapped in procrastination

By Moracco Alexander

Muhammad University of Islam

As if teenagers don’t have enough worries or issues to battle, many are suffering from procrastination due to a media addiction that may be hard to kick. Some in society easily slap teens with labels such as slacker, loafer, idler, lazy, good-for-nothing, laggard, lazybones, slug, goof-off and couch potato. Another loss generation they may say.

Many young people defend themselves by saying they are not lazy and can’t be easily squeezed into a one-size-fits-all label. They think that the adults are in the wrong.

A 2003 report from the Magazine Publishers of America noted that many of the more than 30 million teens in the United States thought that most grown-ups were “really stressed out” and that it was a lifestyle they did not want to follow. Stressed out or not, procrastination from excessive television viewing and Web use is robbing teens of a passion to pursue their creative gifts and endangering their health.

George Davenport, 17, acknowledges to procrastinating on a daily basis, saying he is addicted to the media, mainly TV, and neglects honing his show-biz talents.

“I do rapping, I sing, I’m a songwriter, I love to act, and I do all kinds of dancing but the one I’m best at and enjoy the most is krumping,” he said in talking about his interests. “My profession is really entertainment.”

But like so many teens, Davenport doesn’t pursue or engage in those activities in earnest, pointing a finger at all the time he spends television watching and Internet surfing.

“I started to watch TV a lot when I found out about ‘Adult Swim’ and every single cartoon on the program is hilarious, and I love it,” he said of cable television’s Cartoon Network.

“When I got a Facebook account and I saw that I could find people I knew, I thought it was pretty cool. I’m on Facebook faithfully everyday looking for people I knew from years ago, trying to catch back up with them.

“Also like if some of my current friends don’t have cell phones, we have conversations on Facebook. It’s a cool site to mingle on,” said Davenport, a junior at the Chicago charter high school, Perspectives Calumet. “Talking to my friends, relaxing watching TV and listening to my music is really enjoying, you know?”

He is not alone, according to a study by the Department of Pediatrics at University of Iowa Children's Hospital. The report found that television ate up more time than school, with youth spending 15,000 hours a year watching programs compared with 11,000 hours in school.

In 2009, Nielsen research found that on average American teens use their computers about 90 minutes a day, about a third of that time is spent on the Internet or watching online videos. One of its surveys discovered that 51 percent of the teen respondents checked their social network sites once a day and 22 percent did so more than 10 times a day. Other data showed that the typical U.S. teenager spends 11 hours and 32 minutes a month on the Web, compared with a national average of 29 hours and 15 minutes.

“It seems a lot easier to just sit around [because] to critique my craft takes valuable time. When I do take the time I need to work on my craft, it happens periodically because for some strange reason the media holds my attention longer,” Davenport said.

“Let’s see, if I don’t have to get up and go to work, I get up around 11 or 12 [a.m.] and I might do my daily routine around 1. I won’t stop watching TV and everything else until about 8 or 9 [p.m.],” he added.

Experts inside and outside the medical field say this media addiction combined with a more sedentary lifestyle is unhealthy. They point to the growing concerns for young people, including poor diets and increasing rates of obesity, diabetes, respiratory ailments and heart problems.

Research by the Association of Obesity found that 12 percent of parents thought their child was overweight and at least 24 percent of them said teens were less physically active and eat less healthier than in the past. A separate study reported that overweight adolescents had a 70 percent chance of becoming overweight or obese adults, and Wellspring, a multi-service health agency, estimated obese 18-year-olds could expect to spend an extra $549,907 in their lifetimes due to their weight.

So advocates say it is in the best interest of society for teens to have less of their time consumed by TV and the Internet.

When Davenport was asked if he could kick his media addiction and turn his attention elsewhere, he replied with humor.

“I’m so addicted I do not even think that I can answer that right now,” he joked. “I could probably break this addiction in less than a month. Two months tops.”