Irish parents monitoring child internet use

IRISH PARENTS are more likely than their European peers to supervise and control their children's use of the internet, but their children are least likely to turn to them with an problem they encountered online, a report published by the European Commission has found. The survey canvassed 12,750 randomly-selected parents of 6-17-year-olds across the EU, including 500 in Ireland, for their views on their children's use of the internet.

It showed that parents in Ireland, the UK and some southern European countries - including Portugal, Spain and Italy - were more likely to regularly supervise their child when using the internet and to check what their child had done online. For example, parents in Ireland were the most likely to answer that they always (44 per cent) or very frequently (35 per cent) stayed nearby when their child used the internet.

In general, parents with a lower education level were slightly more likely to check their child's online activities, with one-third of the least-educated parents saying they regularly checked their child's e-mail account, compared to only slightly more than one-fifth of parents in the highest educational category.

Despite Irish parents' close monitoring of internet use, however, just 18 per cent - the second lowest of all EU states - of Irish children had asked for a parent's help when a problem occurred using the internet.

This compared with 48 per cent of children in Denmark and 40 per cent in Spain.

Some 11 per cent of Irish parents - just below the EU average - said that, when their child asked for their help, this was because they had been contacted by a stranger, were bullied or harassed online or saw violently or sexually-explicit images online.

Parents in all countries mentioned that they imposed various rules and restrictions when their child used the internet. For example, about eight out of 10 parents listed online shopping, talking to people that their child did not know and spending a lot of time online as prohibited activities.

Irish parents were found to have some of the strictest monitoring procedures and sanctions in place. They were the most likely to ban their child from using chat rooms (92 per cent), significantly higher than the EU average of 61 per cent, and were more likely than most of their peers to use monitoring and filtering software to limit their childs activities. Some 65 per cent of them said they used one or both of these tools.

On awareness about safety measures, 92 per cent of respondents across all states most often thought of the police when asked how they would report illegal or harmful content, although 36 per cent of Irish parents said they would report such content to a hotline.

Simon Grehan of the National Centre for Technology in Education said the research showed very high levels of awareness among Irish parents of potential problems. But we have got to constantly make sure that the interventions are the most effective ones parents are making. It's a very fast-moving target, so what children are doing online is changing very quickly."