A High Percentage of Children Access the Internet Unsupervised
October 30th, 2009
If we were to say that children nowadays are growing up too fast, it would not be wrong at least in context of the recent UK Children’s Media Literacy interim report, published by Ofcom.
The report suggests that a high percentage of children and teenagers are accessing net from their bedrooms without any supervision by elders. The statistics suggest that the problem with children accessing internet from their rooms gets mere serious because of their ignorance and failure to conduct basic security checks, especially while visiting new sites. These instances are not just limited to not asking others before visiting a site, but extend to their failure of looking for security padlocks and checking up on quality of the materials.
Though the number of children making use of security settings on social networking websites has shown an increase from 59% to 69% this year, there has been a corresponding increase in the bedroom internet connections of the children in the age group of 12-15 and 8-11. The connections have grown from 20% to 35% and 9% to 16% respectively.
Another statistical observation made by the report is that around 60% of the children in the age group of 12-15 access net without any adult supervision, though the number is lower in the age group of 8-11(around 33%), and yet lower in the age group of 5-7 (21%). However, the bigger problem is that despite being aware of the consequences related to unsupervised access to digital TV and internet, less than 45% of the parents have actually installed internet checks and other filters on their computers.
To help parents, Ofcom has published a guide for parental control on the home PC, so that the internet access of children can be supervised. It encourages the parents to talk to their children about the safe usage of internet.
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