FindItMore | The widespread adoption of numerous digital technologies through today’s teens has added a contemporary wrinkle to a universal problem of parental – especially, striking a balance in between allowing independent exploration and also giving an appropriate level of parental oversight. Digital connectivity provides a lot of potential advantages through connecting along with peers to accessing educational content. However, parents have also voiced concerns regarding the behaviors kids engage in online, the people along with whom they interact and also the personal info they make available. Certainly, these concerns aren’t limited to parents. Lawmakers and also advocates have raised worries about problems such as on the internet safety, cyberbullying and also privacy issues affecting kids.
Most parents make sure what their kid does online and also on social media and also take along with them about acceptable on the internet behavior Furthermore, digital technology has become so central to teens’ lifestyles which a significant share of parents now makes use of a new tool to enforce family rules grounding misbehaving teens. Some 65% of parents have taken their teen’s mobile or internet privileges away being a punishment.
However, restrictions to screen time aren’t always consequences of bad behavior, parents often have regulations in place regarding how often and also when their kid could go online. Some 55% of parents say they limit this amount of time as well as times of day the kid could be on the internet.
When it reaches to tracing their kid’s digital use and also interactions, parents tend in order to take a hands-on approach to tracing what their children do:
- 61% of parents speak they’ve ever checked that sites their teen visits.
- 60% have ever checkered the teen’s social media profiles.
- 56% have still friended as well as followed the teen on Fb, Twitter as well as some other social media platform.
- 48% have still looked via their teen’s phone call records as well as text messages.
Furthermore, almost half (48%) of parents be acquainted with the password to the teen’s e-mail account, as 43% know the password to the teen’s mobile.
However, even as parents make use of a number of these hands-on techniques to monitor their kid, they’re comparatively less likely to use technology-based equipment to monitor, block as well as track their kid. This is a reliable pattern which has also emerged in prior Pew Research Center surveys of technology utilize through parents and also teens. For example, the new survey results show:
- 39% of parents report by parental controls for blocking, filtering as well as monitoring their teen’s on the internet activities.
- 16% use parental controls to limit their teen’s make use of his as well as her mobile.
- 16% use spying tools on the teen’s mobile to monitor their location.
Besides taking a variety of steps to check up on the teen’s on the internet behavior, the vast majority of parents too try to take a practical approach to stopping issues through speaking along with their kid regarding what constitutes acceptable and also unacceptable on the internet behavior. Specifically:
- 94% of parents say they have ever talked along with their kids about what is appropriate for them to share on the internet, along with 40% doing so frequently.
- 95% have ever talked along with their kid regarding suitable content for them to view on the internet, along with 39% doing so frequently.
- 95% have still talked along with their kid regarding suitable media to use (such as TV, music, books, magazines as well as other media), along with 36% doing so frequently.
- 92% of parents have ever spoken along with their kid about their on the internet behavior towards others, along with 36% doing so frequently.
A note regarding the findings in this survey:
At the same time, you will find a number of broad trends which resonate in both the current and also previous work. As in past Pew Research Center studies, the research finds that a most of parents report discussing satisfactory on the internet behavior along with their kid or checking up on what sites they kid visits. Meanwhile, the share of parents who make use of more technically oriented techniques, such as parental spying app, to monitor their teen’s digital life continues to stay fairly low.