Carol and Daniel Winikerei's children, believe it or not, prefer playing outside to spending their days cooped up inside their Jacka home staring at screens.

According to new research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Winikerei kids' tendency to spend less than two hours a week doing screen-based activities outside school puts them among just 7.3 per cent of Australian children aged between five and 14.

The study found 90.3 per cent of kids in that age range spent time on screen-based activities when not at school, and most of those – 56.8 per cent – were glued to screens for 10 or more hours each week.

The Winikereis have four children, with three of them between five and 14 and the youngest just 10 months old.

They live in a house that doesn't even have an internet connection.

"When we moved in, we started looking at providers and I  said to my husband, 'Do we really even need it?'" Mrs Winikerei said.

"When we do want to use it, we just hotspot through my phone."

While it had occasionally been challenging to convince seven-year-old Isabel the family didn't need wi-fi, it was mostly never a problem and her sons Toka, 9, and Tahi, 11, relished any opportunity to go out and ride their bikes and scooters, or play with friends in the area.

Mrs Winikerei said the family was lucky in that respect, given a lot of children could not separate themselves from their gadgets and there were several documented cases of kids being violent towards parents who tried to place limitations on their use of technology.

She found the majority of children spending 10 or more hours each week looking at screens outside school hours "bizarre".

Mrs Winikerei said her children took part in so many after-school activities like soccer, jiujitsu and dancing they barely had time to think about the fact they weren't using technology.

"[Without the internet], we bond more with the kids. There’s no time where everyone’s sitting around on an iPad doing nothing," the mother-of-four said.

"We don’t really have to try to keep them off technology. If they're home, they’d just be doing other things.

"They’re not upset or anything that we don’t have wi-fi. It’s just like, ‘Oh well, we’ll play outside more’."

However, Mrs Winikerei admitted technology did need to play some part in the children's lives to prevent them falling behind at school.

The kids were allowed to spend time on screen-based activities between Friday and Sunday afternoons, but even then, she said they wouldn't spend more than two hours a week on them.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' findings, most children between five and 14 spent less than five hours reading outside school each week.

This was less than half the time the majority of kids dedicated to screen-based activities.

"Our report looks at the activities that children are doing outside school hours," the bureau's director of education, training and cultural statistics, Michelle Ducat, said.

"Screen-based activities are the most popular, followed by reading for pleasure.

"Screen-based activities include watching TV, using the internet or playing screen-based games."