The folks at Common Sense Media recently issued a report that said parents are more troubled about how much their kids play and interact with media (video games, TV, and social networks) than they are about drinking, smoking, or sexual behavior. The study, a poll of families, showed that kids are spending more time with media (45 hours a week) than either with their parents or in school.

While I know that it’s disconcerting, I want to offer another way to think about it. Media is their constant companion, increasingly at their sides or in their pockets as they go through their daily lives. As they become intertwined, we should stop worrying as much about how much time they’re spending with media and worry more about what they’re doing with it and how to make the experience safer and better.

It’s going to get more and more difficult to separate the kid from the machine. Some experts have already coined the term lifelogging–continually electronically documenting (and viewing) life as it happens. Life becomes a media event, totally on the record. Always documented. Media hours and our life hours are one big mashup.

As parents, we probably fathered the life seen through the eyes of media the moment we started videotaping the birthday parties and ballet recitals at the expense of being there. Our view of our own children’s lives has been better documented than any other generation, until this one, that is.

My vote is to turn the discussion around from trying to segment “media time” to a discussion about how to creatively integrate media with the rest of life. Segmenting media time may soon be a moot point. Now that the electronic device is quickly becoming the electronic extension we’ve got to reframe the conversation.