3. Children online

Around half of Irish children and teenagers spend an average of one to three hours online each day and many do so from their bedrooms, without parental supervision. These are some of the topline findings from a survey that canvassed the views of more than 18,000 children and teenagers.

The large sample size was split into two groups – primary students, who were mainly aged 11, and secondary students and members of youth groups. Different usage patterns were recorded between the two groups, with a strong social media and communications bias among the older group.

For the teenagers, the majority (56%) go online from the family kitchen or sitting room, but 44% said that they accessed the internet from their bedrooms. Among the primary group, 23% used the internet in their bedrooms while slightly more than half the sample said that they used it from their kitchen or sitting room.

The survey threw up some serious privacy concerns. Nearly a quarter (24%) of the older group indicated that they did not use privacy settings, while over a third (36%) of the younger group (primary) said they didn’t know how to keep their social network accounts private.

Source: ISPCC, Children and the internet: “This will come back to bite us in the butt.” Published Oct 2011.

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