This is how parents control the online movements of their teenagers
The digital world has opened a huge world without leaving home. This is mainly observed in the behaviors of the so-called digital natives, the adolescents, who have put 'against the ropes' the already outdated ways that parents had to control and care for their children. How have they adapted to this? We tell you how parents now control the online movements of their teenagers.
The digital world offers many potential benefits, as the connection between equals or access to educational content. However, parents are aware of the risks and dangers that involve adolescents' behavior when they are online, especially those related to the people with whom they interact: more and more experts are calling attention to the need to be careful with privacy, cyberbullying and security online.
About, Pew Research Center has conducted a survey among parents of adolescents between 13 and 17 years old to find how today's parents deal with this new reality and they try to protect the 'digital lives' of their children while encouraging them to make safe and responsible use of these new technologies. The surveys were conducted between September and October 2014 and February and March 2015 and their results have been published in January 2016.
Punishments and limits to new technologies
As they explain from this American research center, digital technology has become in something central to the lives of adolescents, who invest a very important part of their days in sharing content on social networks. That they are such an important part of their lives also makes parents use them as punishment: 65 percent of parents prohibit phones or Internet access as a form of punishment.
Yes, restrictions on the use of screens They are not always the result of teenagers' misbehavior, as parents often set standards about the frequency and time that teens can connect: 55 percent of parents say they limit the time their children can be online , according to this survey.
Survey on parents and adolescents regarding social networks
Among the most striking data of this survey, it is noteworthy that 61 percent (that is, six out of ten) of parents check which portals their children visit when they use the internet. Likewise, a very similar percentage of them (60 percent) monitors the profiles of their teenagers in social networks.
On the other hand, slightly less than half (48 percent) of respondents say they look at calls or messages from their children's smartphones, while 39 percent of parents use some type of parental control over the activities of your children online.
There are many less those who use these parental controlss to limit the use of mobile phones: only 16 percent do it, an identical percentage to that of parents who use monitoring tools to track the location of their children with their smartphones.
Education about internet dangers
Not only the children live in control: it is necessary to educate them in responsible use of new technologies because, however 'digital natives' may be, there are things that escape them and in which parents must influence. About this also has asked the survey of Pew Research Center, which shows that parents are increasingly concerned about talking with their children about these issues, although there is still much to be done.
In this line, the survey reveals that the majority of parents (56 percent) speaks "frequently" about the appropriate or inadequate behavior of their children in school, home and life in society. However, the percentage drops to 40 percent in the case of those who talk frequently about the dangers of sharing information online.
It is striking that 95 percent of parents He has had conversations with his children about what content they see online, although only 39 percent have done it frequently. In the case of conversations about content consumed on television, music, books and magazines, the percentage of parents who frequently speak of this is only 36 percent.
Worrying is that only 36 percent of parents speak frequently about the importance of maintain proper behavior towards others when we are online. 42 percent say they do it "occasionally", while 15 percent do it "rarely" and seven percent have never done it.
Angela R. Bonachera
