I love stats, because stats tell a story, and I can only
make sense of things when I understand the story. These posts are my attempts
to make sense of the various stats that I come across in my work as School
Governor with responsibility for e-Safety.
- 49% of British
children aged 12 and under, would be sad without access to the web, while one
in five would be lonely. (Intersperience, January 2012)
- In 2012, 12-15 year
olds spent as much time using the Internet as watching television. (OfCom,
October 2012)
- 80% of 12-15 year
olds have an active social networking site profile. (OfCom, October
2012)
The fact that children have a strong emotional attachment to
the internet is perfectly natural for a generation whose social life is largely
online.
So we can guess that since adults generally don’t live
online to the same extent, so it’s also natural that adults do not have the
same emotional attachment to the Internet, and do not empathise with their
child’s emotional attachment. Simply put, we haven’t grown up with the
Internet, so we aren’t immersed in it. Except that’s not true:
- In 2012, 33 million
adults accessed the Internet every day, more than double the 2006 figure of 16
million, when directly comparable records began. (ONS, November 2012)
- Approximately 87% of
adults aged between 16 and 24, used social networking sites in 2012, compared
to 48% of all adults. (ONS, November 2012)
Perhaps our discomfort is from our perception that it’s the
adult that needs the help, not the child:
- 23% of teachers didn't feel staff had received
adequate training in relation to e-safety. (National Foundation for Educational
Research, 2012)
- 21% of teachers did
not feel confident advising a pupil on using social networking sites safely.
(National Foundation for Educational Research, 2012)
Except that’s not true either. As with most things, children
need to learn, and learn from their role models:
- Teens revealed that
they rely most heavily on their parents for online safety information (74%),
followed by school or teachers (66%) and other adults (51%). Only 29% reported
getting their online safety information from social media, such as Facebook or
Twitter. (Family Online Safety Institute, October 2012)
And when they don’t learn from their role models, they learn
the hard way:
- Nearly half (43%) of
teens reported posting something online they later regretted. Of these
responses, the main reasons for regretting a post was that it was mean to
someone else (28%) or shared too much information (28%). (Family Online Safety
Institute, October 2012)
Now we all did stupid things in our reckless youth. The
problem is, the Internet makes our mistakes permanent.
The stats show that there’s a perception gap between adults
and children of who learns from whom. Interestingly, the stats show that
parents are perhaps too comfortable in the Internet savvy of their children:
- 62% of teens believed
their parents to be well informed about their online activity, whereas 91% of
parents reported that level of awareness - a perception gap of 29%. (Family
Online Safety Institute, October 2012)
- Whilst only 39% of
teens reported that their parents exercised any oversight or monitoring of
their online activity, 84% of parents reported such monitoring – a 45% gap in
perception. (Family Online Safety Institute, October 2012)
So this perception gap illustrates where our discomfort
comes from, because we don’t have the same view of using the Internet as our
children. Perhaps this perception gap comes about because using Internet ceases
to become a supervised activity as the child gets older, and demands more
privacy, or just does things that we’re not interested in:
- Only 2% of children
and young people aged 7-16 had never accessed the Internet in 2012. 70% of
children and young people aged 7-16 accessed the Internet in their own room.
(Childwise, May 2013)
- 73% of children and
young people aged 5-16 owned their own computer. (Childwise, May 2013)
- 44% of children aged
5-10 and 96% of children aged 11-16 owned a mobile phone. (Childwise, May 2013)
- 56% of children aged
5-10 and 73% of children aged 11-16 had their own games console at home,
spending an average of 1.5 and 1.7 hours per day on their console respectively.
(Childwise, May 2013)
This is the “generational divide” that
Dr
Tanya Byron talks about, and it is this lack of shared experience that
leads parents to a risk-averse attitude.
And when we talk to our teens in a grown up way, they don’t
listen!
- Whilst 93% of parents
reported having a conversation with their teen about online safety, only 61% of
teens report having such a conversation with their parents [a perception gap of
32%]. (Family Online Safety Institute, October 2012)
So the Internet isn’t so different from any other part of
family life, then.
