14 DAY TRIAL // Gone are the days when children used to spend hours on end playing outside, finding new creative ways in which to have fun and make friends. Nowadays, children can surprise you by grabbing any mobile device and start texting, browsing or shooting videos in a way that puts even adults to shame.
A report by Influence Central, entitled Kids & Tech: The Evolution of Today’s Digital Natives, reveals that the average age of a child getting their first smartphone is 10.3 years while 45% of children own a smartphone, compared to 39% in 2012.
In addition, 39% of children get a social media account around the age of 11 while 11% get it when they are younger than 10. This would mean that gradually children start communicating more on the Internet, rather than on the playfield.
The report also revealed some changes in parent behavior, as 85% of children accessed the Internet from a room shared with the family in 2012 and that number dropped to 75% today. Children use their phone to text and 31% of parents stated for the study that they received texts from their children when they were in the same room together.
However, some parents are diligent when it comes to the content that their children access online, 27% of them use online programs to filter sites with inappropriate content, compared to 23% four years ago.
As technology continues to advance and become more and more accessible to anyone, it will clearly have an increasing influence on upcoming generations, as the days when all you needed in order to play with a friend was to go outside, seem to have long passed.