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Games and Leisure Computer Use vs Time Socializing in Person, Ages 15–24 · U.S.
Average hours per day, ages fifteen to twenty-four: playing games and computer use for leisure (top), socializing and communicating in person (bottom)
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Time use from the BLS American Time Use Survey: average hours per day over all days of the year, everyone in the age group counted; no estimate for the pandemic year of the survey shutdown. Games and computer use for leisure for ages fifteen to twenty-four is a Palanor sum of the two parts BLS publishes for the age group. Small samples make single years noisy; read the trend. The two panels have their own scales. Lines moving together do not show that one caused the other. Researchers disagree about what smartphones and social media do to young people's mental health: Jonathan Haidt argues they are a major cause of the rise in teen anxiety and depression; Candice Odgers and Amy Orben argue the evidence shows small or unclear effects.
How Americans aged fifteen to twenty-four spend their days, from BLS time diaries since 2003: time on games and leisure computer use went up while time spent socializing in person went down.
What this chart reads
- Time Spent Playing Games and Using a Computer for Leisure (ATUS, Ages 15–24)as “Games and computer leisure”latest 2025-12-31
- Time Spent Socializing and Communicating (ATUS, Ages 15–24)as “Socializing in person”latest 2025-12-31
Sources
Time Spent Playing Games and Using a Computer for Leisure (ATUS, Ages 15–24). Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey, annual averages (series TUU10101AA01021211 + TUU10101AA01021432), https://www.bls.gov/tus/. Public domain; BLS asks to be cited as the source. Fetched by bls-sync from the BLS public API. BLS publishes the two parts for ages 15 to 24 but not their total, so Palanor adds them: games plus computer use for leisure. For all persons the published combined line (TUU10101AA01016299) equals the sum of its two parts in every year to the hundredth.
Time Spent Socializing and Communicating (ATUS, Ages 15–24). Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey (series TUU10101AA01014045). Annual, public domain.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.