«My child is being bullied online» - and 8 other parental worries

WORRY 1: My child is only interested in their mobile phone and neglects everything else.

In fact, the recently published JAMES study shows that Swiss young people spend 25 per cent more time online today than they did two years ago. The 12 to 19-year-olds surveyed said that they spend an average of 2.5 hours online during the week and 3 hours and 40 minutes a day at the weekend.
One explanation for the increase is that the Internet is almost everywhere: 99 per cent of young people own a mobile phone and say they use it daily or several times a week. A third of young people already have more than 5 gigabytes of mobile internet at their disposal every month, meaning they can be online everywhere and all the time. However, as young people are not always online when they are on their mobile phones, their self-assessed usage time is even higher: namely 3.5 hours per day during the week and 4.5 hours at the weekend.
What is exciting, however, is that the frequency of leisure activities without media is not decreasing. Young people are meeting friends just as often as before, going to sports, relaxing, looking after pets and making music. So they are doing one thing more and more, but at the same time they are not abandoning the other.
What's more, online and offline are becoming more and more intertwined, making it increasingly difficult to self-assess the amount of time spent online. Does meeting friends count as a non-media activity if you chat and watch a YouTube video in between?

WORRY 2: My child reveals too much about himself!

Probably not. Young people are increasingly hesitant when it comes to publishing personal content. Do you remember YouNow? The platform that enables livestreams with chat from a child's bedroom and has terrified parents? This year, the JAMES study asked for the first time who uses this option. Just two per cent of young people do this regularly, seven per cent at least once a month. Blogs, podcasts and Wikipedia articles are also very rarely created by young people. They are slightly more likely to upload music or sound files to the internet (around 15 per cent do this monthly) or participate in forums. Only photos and videos are really regularly uploaded to the Internet by young people. But here, too, the figures are lower than many would expect: 11 per cent of young people do this several times a week, 39 per cent at least once a month.
It is noticeable that the most frequent activities of young people on social networks are passive activities: Viewing and «liking» photos and profiles. Or that they take place in a more private setting (chatting and sending messages). 61 per cent state that they mainly post photos on social networks, compared to just 23 per cent for videos. A reassuring fact: it is very unlikely that strangers will suddenly turn up on your doorstep. Only 15 per cent of the young people surveyed disclose their real place of residence on a social network. Even fewer, namely 8 per cent, disclose their telephone number.

WORRY 3: My child doesn't understand Facebook's complicated privacy settings.

That's right. And that is one of the reasons why many young people prefer to share their pictures and messages on platforms where they can better control who can see them. On Instagram, for example, the account is quickly set to private, and on WhatsApp and Snapchat, the young people themselves decide who the recipient of their picture is.

With this shift to more private networks, however, there is also a slight decrease in concern about privacy. Today, 74 per cent of young people say that they protect their privacy. In 2012 it was still 84 per cent. This makes it all the more important that you talk to your child about the fact that any digital photo can be shared on the internet. Even one that was sent to a friend in confidence via WhatsApp.

WORRY 4: My child meets paedophiles on the Internet.

It is no longer a rarity for an online acquaintance to be followed by a real-life meeting: 41 per cent of young people have already experienced this. The meeting itself doesn't have to be dangerous if you stick to certain rules, such as going to a public place and taking a parent with you. In this way, online acquaintances can turn into real friendships - or even love.
The downside of the ease of making contact online: a quarter of young people have already experienced being approached online in an unwanted way and with sexual intentions - in technical jargon, this is known as cybergrooming. At 34 per cent, girls are affected much more frequently than boys (17 per cent).

CONCERN 5: My child is being bullied online.

As the internet is an important place for young people to communicate, bullying also takes place here - just like in the classroom. The problem with studies on cyberbullying is that there is no universal definition of cyberbullying. Does a «Wow, you're ugly» under a Facebook photo already fall into the category of bullying, or is it simply the tone of voice among young people online?

The JAMES study helps itself by asking two questions: Around a fifth of young people say that it has happened to them at some point that someone has tried to get them down on the internet. In response to the somewhat more specific question of whether false or insulting things have ever been spread about them on the Internet, only 12 per cent answered yes.

The nasty thing about bullying on the internet compared to «normal» bullying is that there are no safe havens. It doesn't stop when the young person comes home. And the fact that the young person cannot know how many people are watching and reading is a particularly big burden for them.

CONCERN 6: My child automatically comes into contact with violence and pornography online.

If you have a teenage son, the likelihood of him watching porn films on his mobile phone or computer is actually very high. Around three quarters say that this has already happened. Among girls, just a fifth of those surveyed admit to this.
Sending and receiving pornography on mobile phones is also more of a boy's thing. Only when it comes to sexting, i.e. sending provocative photos and videos of themselves, are boys and girls roughly on a par: 10 per cent of girls and 11 per cent of boys say they have done this.
The difference between the sexes is less marked for videos depicting violence than for pornography. Around two thirds of young people in Switzerland say that they have seen something like this. The figure is 76 per cent for boys and 53 per cent for girls.

WORRY 7: My child is forgetting what true friendship means on social networks. It only collects followers.

Compared to 2014, the number of contacts young people have online has increased slightly: Young people have an average of 427 friends on Facebook and 531 on Instagram - where they are called followers, and accepting a contact does not mean that people follow each other.

Whether young people confuse these contacts with real friends cannot be directly deduced from a statistical study such as the JAMES study. However, it is noticeable that the number of friends is much lower on the Snapchat network, where the sharing tends to be more personal: it is 154 contacts. As the willingness to share on more open social networks is subject to a downward trend (see concern 2), it can therefore be assumed that young people are aware of who belongs to their inner circle of friends and to whom they therefore want to reveal more about themselves.

CONCERN 8: My child doesn't use the communication options on the Internet at all. He only plays computer games. And it makes him lonely!

While many parents use Facebook, WhatsApp and the like themselves, games are a closed book for them. That's why they don't realise that many online games have a chat function. Communication there harbours the same opportunities and risks as chats in social networks or public chat rooms.
Statistically speaking, according to the JAMES study, gaming is more of a boy's thing: 91 per cent of boys play video games, 42 per cent of girls. On average, kids spend one to two hours a day playing games. The JAMES study also has a potentially reassuring fact: the intensity of gaming decreases with increasing age of the respondents.

WORRY 9: My child is falling into the debt trap with their mobile phone.

Statistically at least, this cannot be confirmed. For half of those surveyed, the mobile phone bill is between 20 and 55 francs per month. Together with the outliers at the top or bottom, the average mobile phone bill is CHF 39 per month. This is only two francs more than in 2014, even though young people are online longer than back then.
As they get older, more and more young people have a subscription with unlimited data volume, so there are no nasty surprises at the end of the month. They also make fewer and fewer phone calls and send fewer text messages. A high data volume alone therefore usually covers all their needs.
Image: Bill Cheyrou / Alamy Stock Photo