(AP) "Go to your room and do your homework" may not sound like such a bad idea to many children.

Nearly a third of kids 8 to 18 say when they're doing schoolwork at home, they're often talking on the phone, surfing the Web, instant messaging, watching TV or listening to music at the same time.

The finding is part of a Kaiser Family Foundation survey that showed what many parents already know — kids' rooms are turning into multimedia centers.

For instance, 54 percent of children's bedrooms had a VCR or DVD player last year, up from 36 percent in 1999, and 31 percent of kids had a computer in their room, up from 21 percent.

What effect so-called "media multitasking" has on the often fragile ability of kids to focus is unclear because detailed research is quite new, said Vicky Rideout, the foundation vice president who directed the study.

"We are not necessarily saying that kids spending more time with more media is a bad thing," Rideout said. "This is something all parents have to decide based on what age their kids are, how they are doing in school and the parents' own values."

Place some of the blame — or the praise — on the Internet and technology like instant messaging that have become widely used tools for education and entertainment, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"The parental fear is that this can't be good by splitting kids' attention into so many segments," Rainie said. "Yet the argument in favor of it is you are more efficient, you can do things on the fly that you couldn't do before."

Kaiser surveyed more than 2,000 third through 12th graders between October 2003 and March 2004 about their recreational or non-school use of TV and videos, music, video games, computers, movies and print. The study included nearly 700 panelists who kept seven-day "media diaries."

On average, kids devoted six hours and 21 minutes a day to recreational media use, up just two minutes from 1999, the Kaiser study found. That's more than 44 hours a week — four more hours than a parent's typical work week.

But 26 percent of kids in 2004 said they "multitasked" when using any form of media, up from 16 percent five years earlier. That could mean a child downloading music over the Internet while talking on the phone, or chatting online while watching a favorite TV show.

Over the same period the proportion of kids' homes that have two or more computers jumped from 25 percent to 39 percent, and the proportion with Internet access in the home grew from 47 percent to 74 percent.

The percentage of kids who can surf the Web from the privacy of their own bedroom doubled from 10 percent to 20 percent. The proportion that watch cable or satellite TV from their own room grew from 29 percent to 37 percent.

In many homes, that means a child is constantly exposed to television — whether someone is actually watching or it is just on in the background.

Amy Bobb, 41, of Harrisburg, Pa., says her son Wesley, who will turn 8 in June, doesn't have a TV in his room and probably never will. Bobb also has a 3-year-old son. She gives Wesley a "ticket" to watch 30 minutes of television in the family room for every 30 minutes he spends reading a book.

"As they get older, I don't want them to disappear in the bedroom and watch television," she said.

Such rules aren't the norm, according to the Kaiser study. Fifty-three percent of kids said their families had no rules for TV viewing. The remaining kids said they had rules, but just 20 percent said the rules were enforced most of the time.

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