A study released yesterday on Internet use by elementary school students indicated that parents may often be unaware that their children are meeting friends they find on the Internet in person.
The Children’s Welfare League Foundation and Microsoft Taiwan polled children from 14 randomly selected elementary schools across the country, collecting 1,183 valid samples.
“We should be concerned that more than 20 percent of respondents said they meet online friends in person the same day they’ve met them [online], and that more than half of [these respondents] said they do so alone,” Microsoft Taiwan corporate affairs director Hope Ong (王秀芬) told a news conference in Taipei yesterday.
Compared with the results of a separate survey of 243 parents with children in the fifth and sixth grades, Ong said it was clear that children and parents have very different ideas about meeting friends on the Internet.
“While only 25 percent of parents think that their children make friends online, 45 percent of children say they do,” Ong said. “Less than 5 percent of parents think their kids have actually met someone they got to know online.”
Less than 25 percent of parents said they knew the password for their children’s online messenger accounts or the Web address of any blog they maintain, Ong said, adding that knowing about a child’s Internet activities can help police if a child goes missing after meeting an online friend in person.
Alicia Wang, (王育敏), executive director of the foundation, said “about 35 percent of children who have gone missing after meeting online friends in person could be found within a week if the parents had more information about their child’s online activities,” Wang said.
She said parents should tell their children not to reveal personal information online and only to meet online friends in person after discussing it with their parents.
Children should use the Internet only with parental supervision and proper filtering of Web content, she said.
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