Children and adolescents between the ages of 9 and 17 are online for an average of 2.4 hours per day - and over three hours on weekends. This results from survey of the Hamburg Leibniz Institute for Media Research, which was supported, among others, the United Nations Children's Fund Unicef. For the representative study, the Institute surveyed 1044 children and adolescents as well as one parent each.
These averages should be considered with a little caution - after all, the information depends heavily on, for example, whether young people have their own internet-enabled smartphones, tablets or computers.
Older adolescents aged 15 to 17, for example, reported 3.4 hours a day and four hours a week on weekends. In 9- to 11-year-old children the daily value was 1.4 hours. Ninety percent of 15- to 17-year-old respondents said they used a smartphone at least several times a day, compared with 38 percent of 9- to 11-year-olds.
In a press release to the study, it is said that the results show "that can not be said of the online and online experiences": "Children and adolescents develop depending on their age-related development phase and gender preferences, sometimes on a family background very specific patterns of dealing with online media. "
Exchange, information and distraction
Mobile phones and computers are used according to the study for communication and information, but also as a distraction. A quarter of young people said they shared their hobbies and common interests with others on the web. One third informs itself there by own statement about current news.
Girls and boys are online for about the same amount of time. However, there are also differences between these two groups in terms of network use: girls are finding out that they are more likely to find work-related opportunities and are more active in social networks. Boys spend more time playing online games.
About half of the children and adolescents surveyed said they were bored when they could not be online. 28 percent reported that they had tried unsuccessfully several times to reduce their usage time. In addition, 42 percent of respondents said that they use the Internet at least sometimes, even though they would not be interested at the moment.
1044 children and adolescents interviewed
The latter figures sound alarming at first glance, presumably - the study provides no comparison value here - but would also report similar to adults. Comparing online behavior, and above all the internet usage times of adolescents and adults, is generally a difficult undertaking: For example, because many adults need the Internet for their job and for that reason are sometimes online many hours a day.
In the questionnaire of the Leibniz Institute, 62 percent of the interviewed parents stated that they use the Internet several times a day. The proportion of frequent users among parents is similar to that of children, it says. People who never, or almost never, use the Internet accounted for only about one percent of respondents.
More than half of the parents expressed in the survey the fear that their child could be contacted by the stranger in the net. Every second parent questioned feared that the offspring would see inappropriate content on the net.
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Nine percent of the children and adolescents surveyed actually stated that they had experienced something bad or disturbing online - girls were more affected than boys. Nearly a third of 12- to 17-year-olds also said they had been unintentionally confronted with intimate or offbeat issues during the past 12 months.
The authors of the study called for the strengthening of children's rights in view of the results - also with regard to the behavior of their own parents. "Not all adolescents, for example, are happy when their parents publish and publish pictures of them online," says Uwe Hasebrink, director of the Leibniz Institute for Media Research. "A sensitization also with regard to the rights of children would be necessary here."
Children and adolescents who have had disturbing or bad experiences on the internet need, according to the researchers, more help and support. They also have to teach them, among other things, family and school social skills for dealing with the Internet, it is said.
