Eye-Opening Statistics

Posted by Ken

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The good people over at i-SAFE have released the results of a nationwide survey, which delivers some rather sobering news about teens and their online behavior.

Here’s an excerpt:

12 percent spend more time online than they do with their friends

54 percent prefer to be ALONE when on the Internet

37 percent believe their parents would express concern, restrict their Internet use or take away their computer if they knew where they were on the Internet

40 percent have visited an inappropriate place on the Internet

40 percent trust the people they chat with on the Internet

10 percent have been asked by someone new (a stranger) on the Internet to meet face-to-face

10 percent have actually met face-to-face with a new person (stranger) from the Internet

I find the two parts about 40 percent having visited inappropriate places on the Internet and trusting the people they chat with astounding. I’m not in favor of promoting paranoia in our children, watching over their shoulder all the time, but I would have hoped for a little more caution from them.

So what is your child doing online and what are they thinking inside? Don’t guess — ask them! Are they quickly turning off the monitor or switching to another browser window when you enter the room? If so that could be an indication that they’re up to something they’d rather not let you know about.

I don’t subscribe to the thought some people may have that to get involved like this, to get to know what your child is doing online, is somehow an invasion of privacy. At the same time I don’t want to obliterate all the walls of privacy they’re entitled to. But I think parents have reached an extreme today. Some parents have looked the other way for far too long.

We can’t teach kids from a distance! We send our kids to school for a formal education, but oftentimes that education doesn’t teach the difference between right and wrong. That has to come from home. And when parents stand off to the side while allowing their child to surf the Web as they please, then they’re doing them a great disservice.

The survey points out that 54 percent of the children surveyed preferred being online alone. They also thought their parents would deliver some form of punishment if they ever found out what sites they were visiting and what they do online. Is it so hard to imagine that that type of behavior might exist in our own children?

Read the report

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