OnePoll conducted a study for Lightspeed Systems that looked into the worries American parents had about their children’s screen time. The poll of 2000 American parents with school-going children found that 64% worried about the time their children spent online. About 2 in 3 believe their children’s behaviour changed since they began spending time online.

Many parents allow their children to use the Internet without supervision

About 71% trusted their children enough to allow them to roam the internet without supervision. However, 25% believed they would only trust teenagers online. Despite this concern, most parents would allow their children to use the internet at 11 without supervision.

Parents also believed that their children would see something inappropriate online. This could happen when the parents failed to monitor their online activity (68%) or when they were at school doing assignments (71%).

One of the things parents were most worried about was their children seeing inappropriate content (39%) or receiving messages from strangers (43%). There were different ways parents tracked their children’s online consumption. One method was to use parental control (40%). The same percentage would as to see what their children were doing online.

Another 37% of respondents asked their children to turn in their devices before they went to bed, while 38% did checks on their internet history. About 49% have caught their children online while they were supposed to do their assignments. For this reason, it wasn’t surprising that 63% thought their children would lie about wanting to do homework when they were online.

Parents want schools to track their children’s online activity

Some of the children had devices that the school had issued. Parents felt they didn’t know all the websites their children visited on these devices (66%) compared to personal devices (75%). About 90% would feel more comfortable if the schools used tracking software to make them aware of any inappropriate content or interactions their children were part of.

About 92% of the parents relied on the vigilance of schools to keep their children from inappropriate online content. Three in four parents had also been in situations where the school had reported their children for inappropriate online activities.