A shocking new survey has revealed that “more than half of parents snoop on their children’s online activity.”
What’s shocking about the report, aside from the use of the word “snoop” to describe actually giving a damn about one’s own children, is of course the implication that the other half of parents obviously don’t bother to check up on what their precious progeny are doing online.
Commissioned by security firm Bullguard and polling 2,000 internet users from across the UK, the study said it discovered that 55% of parents “keep an eye” on a son or daughter by checking their social networking profile, while a further 5% said “they would if they knew how.”
So, to clarify – these clueless parents know how to have kids and answer mildly sensational surveys, but not how to log on to Facebook or keep a lazy eye on them? The mind boggles.
Only four in 10 parents admitted to regularly checking their children’s social media status updates, while just 39% said they used Facebook to see who was posting messages to their children’s wall. Perhaps they were too busy their own wall, or were occupied in a particularly thrilling spate of Farmville purchases.
An astonishingly low 29% said they bothered looking through their children’s’ tagged images to see whether their beloved darlings spent their weekends lying in pools of their own vomit outside of nightclubs.
Even more “astonishingly,” 24% of those polled reckoned Facebook was the only way they could really see what their child was up to – which one would have to assume is a full 24% more than those who could feasibly know what their child was up to pre-Facebook era. Ahh, the dark ages.
Only 11% of parents were devious enough – or cared enough – to set up a Facebook account for the sole purpose of spying on their ‘writing’s on the wall’ offspring and just a third admitted that the reason they “snooped” was to know the sort of people their child was mixing with. If sitting pasty-faced in one’s bedroom staring at a computer screen for hours on end is considered mixing, that is.
A slightly more normal stat from the report claims that 16% of parents have attempted to “friend” their child on Facebook, but that 30% of those requests had been rejected. Which is reassuring, because this figure seems similar to ye olde pre-social media era when hardly anyone wanted to be friends with their parents anyway.
13% got around this teenage parental rejection by logging into a friend’s account to check up on their kids, as opposed to taking the computer out of the bedroom.
Luckily, more parents seem comfortable checking their children’s’ internet history with 76% saying they did so to ensure their kids weren’t “visiting unsuitable web sites.”
21% said they checked instant messaging history and 23% fessed up to looking through the sent box on their young ones’ email accounts.
While this may be something of a heartwarming stat to those already nauseated by the above “laissez faire” attitudes, bear in mind that Bullguard says this is only because 41% are worried that their computer might be infected by a virus or malware if a child visits an insecure site or registers for an illegitimate service.
This is what happens when poking leads to having children. Dislike.
