A survey carried out by the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU), in which 506 adolescents between the ages of 16 and 17 have participated, together with 300 parents of young people of the same age, shows that the former use the Internet more than the latter believe.
The 131 minutes of daily use that parents believe their children do falls short of the 170 minutes daily that young people confess. And this time difference stretches even more during the weekend, when parents believe that their children use the Internet for about 180 minutes and young people extend the figure to 230 minutes. That is, almost four hours.
Is it a long time? This is believed by more of the youth (52%) and seven out of ten (71%) parents. In fact, 22% of young people acknowledge that your grades have suffered for that connection time, and two out of three admit that the network has or has had negative effects on them, such as difficulties sleeping (64%), changes in their mood (58%), anxiety symptoms (47% ), angry outbursts (46%), social isolation (37%) or the dreaded cyber bullying (13%). Problems that parents also appreciate, although to a much lesser extent.
All these connections are made mostly through the mobile phone (85%). Less than half of the young people surveyed (46%) connect to the Internet using a laptop, and between two and three out of ten do so from a video game console (33%), from a tablets (27%) or from a desktop computer (24%).
Homework and social networks
Once connected, the activities they carry out differ from what their parents think they do. According to parents, what takes up the most time from their children on the Internet is doing school activities (92% compared to 75% confessed by young people), followed by the social networks (85% vs. 77%).
Regarding social networks, the application most used by minors, according to young people and adults, is instagram (85%), followed by TikTok, used more by young people (81%) than parents believe on average (72%). In general, minors use social networks as Twitter, discord or Snapchat more than their parents think. Call attention to the case of BeReal, used by 21% of the youth surveyed completely unrelated to their parents, who are unaware of its use (0%). 12% of parents believe that their child does not use any social network compared to 6% of youth, and both groups agree on the use of Facebookwhich reaches 16%.
Other types of uses
Both groups coincide exactly in the use of the applications of instant messaging (67%), in the case of online games (57-55%) or in making calls and video calls (50-53%).
However, a higher percentage of young people use the internet more than their parents think to surf the web for non-school reasons (72% vs. 66%), to listen music or see videosor for read the news (30% vs. 10%). More worrisome, however, is the increased use they make of the tool to carry out online shopping (45% vs. 20%) or to visit websites of adult content (14% vs. 2%).
