Abstract
With smartphones and other digital devices, as well as the internet, having become part of everyday life not only for adults but also for children, our research team conducted the Web-Based Survey on News Engagement among Children and Parents through an Online Panel in 2025 to examine how children today engage with news. The study targeted children from the fourth grade of elementary school to the third grade of high school in Japan, typically those aged 10-18. This paper reports the findings.
First, respondents were asked about their general media use. Among fourth- to sixth-grade elementary school children, 41% own smartphones. Nearly 90% of all children use YouTube; internet media use has also become widespread even among younger age groups.
In such a media environment, approximately 70% of children have exposure to news on at least one day per month. Their primary information sources are television for elementary school children and internet media for high school students. In terms of content, children tend to be interested in more entertaining genres. While their interest in “politics” and “economics” is low, it is comparatively high for “incidents and accidents” and “weather and natural disasters.” Furthermore, gender differences are observed in the genres of their interest.
Regarding parent-child conversations, “politics” is the most frequently discussed topic, although this may have been influenced by the timing of the survey. It was also found that children in households where parents and children discuss news topics tend to have more frequent exposure to news. Among the reasons children cited for feeling reluctant to watch television news programs were that “there are few topics relevant to them” and that “they can only learn about fragmented facts and are unable to grasp the overall picture.”
