Parents report taking more steps to monitor and/or limit the amount of exposure their children have to online sexual and violent content. Nearly 2/3s of parents say they closely monitor their child's media use. From the release -
Nearly three out of four parents (73%) say they know âa lotâ about what their kids are doing online (among all parents with children 9 or older who use the Internet at home). Most parents whose children engage in these activities say they check their childrenâs Instant Messaging (IM) âbuddy listsâ (87%), review their childrenâs profiles on social networking sites (82%), and look to see what websites theyâve visited (76%) after theyâve gone online.
The Kaiser Family Foundation sponsored study was released at a meeting in DC Tuesday. The presentation, webcast and podcast are available here. The full report, Parents, Children & Media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey (pdf file), is based on a national survey of 1,008 parents of children ages 2-17 supplemented with focus groups. The survey also explores such issues as media content, media ratings and the V-Chip, media monitoring, educational media, advertising, and the Internet.
For researchers and practitioners, these new results offer some support for the notion that parents are heeding the pervasive messaging about monitoring kids' online behavior, though they seem to be less sure of how to use basic parental control technologies like the V-chip on their television sets or block access to specific websites (and yet they know how to look up buddy lists, social network profiles and histories). I'd like to see the ecological validation studies done before I swallow all of this whole. It's that whole lion in the zoo thing.
Comments