Long-term study of safe Internet use of young children

The Internet is an evolving medium that continuously presents new functionalities. Accordingly, also children's Internet usage changes continuously. This requires being vigilant about related Internet risk behavior and safe Internet use. The present article presents a structured overview of Internet risks and summarizes approaches to foster safe Internet behavior. Based on a long-term cross-sectional study, Internet usage of young children has been researched. The focus is on contact risks and content risks. Based on the analysis of survey data from 10000 children, trends in their (un)safe An Unsafe Internet Usage Index (UIUI) is calculated. The average results point at a rather low level of unsafe Internet usage. But these average results hide between-subject differences and a number of children clearly reflects higher levels of unsafe Internet usage. Also, no consistent reduction in unsafe Internet behavior is being observed over the years. Parental and teacher control seem to decrease, and hardly seem to impact the level of unsafe Internet behavior. Considering a number of limitations of the present study, directions for future research are discussed.