8-12 year-olds and online social interaction
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Loading ...A new report was released last week that zeroed in on online social interaction among youth between the ages of 8 and 12. The “Tween Internet Safety Survey” found that at least half lie about their age online (in keeping with our own findings from discussions with kids around the nation). They also found that approximately half of those 11- and 12-year-olds have their own cell phones. This number seems a bit high to me, but the research was conducted among children with “online access” – and so that population may have more access to technology (and wealth) than a completely random group of kids. Finally, there seems to be some sort of a divide between 8-10 and 11-12, in that the latter group participates significantly more online with personal email, instant messaging, texting, and sending multimedia over their cell phones. Many parents are deciding to allow increased computer- and cell-phone use when their children venture into middle school and the data reflects this. With more kids embracing technology in elementary school, though, similar findings in the future will trend in that direction. This has positives and negatives. Our hope is that parents educate their kids before providing the technology, and that teachers and administrators proactively fill in the gaps.
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July 30th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Hi Sameer,
Very interesting! The numbers correlate well with the numbers I have been gathering informally for about 2 years now. As I speak to parent and teacher (and some student) groups, I ask them to guesstimate about how many kids have cell phones in schools. I was initially blown away, then continually amazed, by the consistency with which I get 90-95% estimate of kids in secondary schools – middle schools and up.
Along with this is the fact that I have been invited to speak to more and more elementary parent, teacher groups in the last year or so. They pretty consistently indicate that at least half of their kids have phones with them. For all age groups, this cuts across ethnic, language, gender and socio-economic lines.
I totally agree with you on the proactive intervention of parents and educators. And as educators, I’d really love to see up co-opt the technology! Let’s have more teachers podcast their lessons, text homework assignments, etc.
Thanks,
Mike
September 15th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I am not necessariy in favor of teachers ‘podcasting lessons’ or ‘texting’ homework assignments, as I feel this is way to broad. There are those individual students who are not able to afford these technologies, and this type of teacher, student interaction may further alienate the student. However, I completely agree that this is a phenomenon that is not slowing down. With cell phones and especially text messaging becoming ever so popular today, kids need to be taught that they can and will be held responsible for things they say/write on their cellular phones. We need these adolescents to know that there is technology to track down cell phone/ computer usage so that they stop feeling invincible to the consequences they otherwise would endure, had they said what they said in the school halls.
I strongly support the idea of having after school seminars with faculty, students, and parents going over computer use and helping to ensure responsible use. Cell phones surely should be closely monitored by parents. A simple checking of the inbox three or four times a week (and than matching it up with the phone records to see if the adolescent is disobeying you by deleting messages)may be an inconvenient, yet necessary step when an adolescent is first given the priveledge of getting a phone.