You know you are in trouble when your 4-year-old is updating his Twitter account more often than he goes potty. Or your 3-year-old is posting quiz results to Facebook faster than he can pedal a Big Wheel.
If the aforementioned scenarios sound outrageous to you then you’ve done a good job of saving your child from being sucked into cyberspace before most of his peers.
According to a new study from Nielsen Online, nearly 16 million U.S. children ages 2 to 11 were online in May, and most of those kids are more tech-savvy than their parents. Given that revelation parents shouldn’t be surprised to learn that, according to Nielsen, young children make up about 9.5 percent of Internet users.
Another startling statistic (to me anyway) is the fact that Nielsen’s research shows that in the past five years the number of preschoolers participating in online activity has grown by 18 percent, compared with just a 10 percent growth among all Internet users. What’s more, this growth comes as the total number of U.S. kids under 14 is declining.
The folks at Nielsen also found that the time children spend online grew 63 percent in the past five years, from nearly 7 hours in May 2004 to more than 11 hours online this past May.
In regards to how the time breaks down according to gender, Nielsen says during the month of May, boys spent on average 7 percent more time online than girls, but girls viewed 9 percent more websites than boys.
So what’s behind this Internet phenomenon?
Experts suspect that young kids are getting online at a faster rate thanks to exposure to the media by their parents and older siblings.
After reading Nielsen’s results I wondered if I should be worried that my preschooler is more interested in playing with her dinosaurs than tweeting about them to her cyber-pals. I got especially concerned when I learned that an increasing amount of young kids are also beginning to produce their own content rather than use the Internet as a passive viewer.
Fortunately, my concern lasted for all of two minutes.
That’s about how long it took for my preschooler to stroll over to me while I was furiously trying to crank out article on my computer, and demand that I: “Throw that computer out and come over and play with me.”