A new piece of research carried out by BBC Learning has revealed that parents are no longer fully aware of the dangers their children could come across on smartphones or tablets.
It turns out that close to 20% of youngsters say that they have been upset by something they have seen on their mobile device. However, only half of that number of parents thought that their kids had come across something upsetting in this way.
90% of the parents who took part in the study said that had spoken to their kids about how to keep away from online dangers when they are using a phone or tablet. However, the majority said that they didn’t carry out any supervision when the youngsters were using the device.
This survey was carried out on behalf of the Safer Internet Day campaign. Tony Neate is the chief executive of Get Safe Online and he said that “none of us” is immune from running into online problems no matter how old we are. He went on to say that children will “almost certainly” come across something inappropriate if control and filters aren’t used as they should be.
Older Kids More Likely to Get Bullied
The results showed that the 13-16 age group was more at risk of online bullying than the younger kids of 8-12. Having said that, parents said they were most worried about the children in the younger age group.
While more than half of parents said that they used parental controls on their child’s tablet, the figure dropped to 40% when it comes to restricting the use of a smartphone.
An example of what parents can be is use the parental controls on an iPhone or iPad to restrict access to websites or apps. These parental controls are password protected.
Do you control your kid’s online access?
[Image courtesy of niderlander/Shutterstock]
