Friday, August 26, 2016

Parents largely unaware of what their children do online, research finds

Study found that 67% of parents said their children were required to report online incidents that made them scared or uncomfortable, but only 32% of teens reported that their parents had imposed such a rule.


The parents of America’s digitally literate teenagers are largely in the dark about their children’s internet activity, new research has shown. 
The new study on teen internet use by the National Cyber Security Alliance found that only 13% of teens thought their parents understood the extent of their internet use.
The survey of 804 online teens and 810 parents of teens found that 60% of teens have created accounts for apps or social media sites without their parents’ knowledge. Only 28% of parents thought their teens had accounts they didn’t know about.
The gap between what teens are doing and what their parents know about is indicative of what the NCSA is calling a “digital disconnect between American teens and parents”.
Another example of this disconnect was the wide disparity between how many parents say they have certain rules for their teenagers’ online activities and how many teens agreed. 
The study found that 67% of parents said their children were required to report online incidents that made them scared or uncomfortable, but only 32% of teens reported that their parents had imposed such a rule. 
“It’s one thing to say: ‘My parents have a rule but I don’t follow it’,” remarked Michael Kaiser, executive director of NCSA. “It’s another to have young people saying that those rules don’t even exist.”
Helping their children navigate a digital adolescence is a major challenge for 21st-century parents. And 62% of teens report spending at least five hours on the internet every day, much of it on mobile devices. Snapchat and Instagram have surpassed Facebook in popularity among teens aged 13-17, while other services such as messaging app Kik are also gaining ground. Many parents don’t use or understand these apps.
And not everything that happens online is pretty. Horror stories about app-enabled kidnappings make headlines, but 39% of teens reported someone being “mean or cruel” to them online in the past year. About one in four said the cruelty related to their sexual orientation, gender or race, and one in five said it was related to their religion.
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Rather than attempting to crack down on teen’s internet usage – or trying to figure out every new app that comes along – parents should accept that they cannot know everything, Kaiser said. “A lot of the emphasis has been on knowing everything your child does online –tracking their downloads, understanding every new app that comes out,” he said.
“We think that parents should probably move away from trying to understand everything their kid is doing online and [toward] helping their kid negotiate their online lives and make decisions.”
That means helping children develop “resistance and resilience to bad things online”, and arming them with problem-solving skills so they’ll know who to turn to if they need help. 
“It’s not about the technology itself. It’s about how you use it,” he said. “A car can drive multiples of the speed limit. You have to teach them to drive well.”

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