The Online Lives of Teenagers

A decade ago, Google didn’t even exist.1 Now it’s so much a part of our daily lives that we’ve turned it into a verb. (How many pressing questions have you googled this week?) Today, 93 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds and 87 percent of their parents regularly access the Internet.2 That’s a huge jump from the 20 percent of Americans who said they used the Internet in 1997 — the first year the U.S. Census Bureau asked questions about the World Wide Web.3

Adults who take the time to recall their pre-Internet years may experience some vertigo when they realize how dependent we’ve become on this omnipresent repository of information. How in the world did we live without instant access to our bank accounts, the weather forecast, and up-to-the minute sports scores? What’s even weirder is considering the perspective of teenagers, many of whom can’t even remember life before the Net.

Given that young people are immersed in the Internet almost to the same degree that they breathe the air, here are some touchstone facts to help parents’ understand and guide their family’s online time:

• A 2006 survey of teenagers who use the Internet reported 37.4 percent saying they spend three or more hours per day online. Nearly 18 percent said they spend two to three hours per day online. A quarter estimated spending one to two hours using the Internet each day, and 19.6 percent reported less than an hour of daily use. And nearly 70 percent of teens said that having no Internet access outside of school would “ruin their day” or “make their day worse.”4
• Depending on who you ask, 555 to 716 percent of teenagers have created a profile on a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook. MySpace is the most popular social networking site among teens, and girls in their older teens are the predominate users of the sites, with 70 percent saying they’ve created an online profile.7
• Of teens who have created social networking profiles, 66 percent say that they limit who can see their profiles.8
• In a survey of young people ages 14 to 24, 71 percent of males and 76 percent of females said that they’d communicated with strangers online.9
• Sixty four percent of teens post photos or video of themselves online, while 58 percent post information about where they live, and 8 percent have posted their cell phone number.10
• As of 2005, 54 percent of families with Internet access used some kind of filtering software to protect young people from accessing harmful content online. Still, 81 percent of parents and 79 percent of teens said that teens aren’t cautious enough with what they divulge about themselves online. Also, 65 percent of parents said — and 64 percent of teens agreed — that teens do things online they wouldn’t want their parents to know about.11
• Forty-one percent of online teens say their parents talk to them “a lot” about Internet safety. And that’s a good thing, as it makes them significantly less likely to post personal information online and significantly less likely to consider meeting in person a stranger whom they’ve met online than their peers whose parents initiate fewer discussions about Internet safety.12

All of this data supports two conclusions: First, the Internet is increasingly pivotal in the lives of teenagers — not only for information-finding, but as the hub of their social lives. Second, the potential both for good and for harm exists, and good communication between parents and young people is likely to be the deciding factor in how teens are influenced by their time spent online. Take the Internet safety pledge courtesy of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. It can be a great conversation starter for you and your teens.

*(Note: Referrals to Web sites not produced by Focus on the Family are for informational purposes only and do not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the sites' content.)

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