The Office of Electronic Communications has presented the results of its latest Consumer Survey 2022, conducted among children and their parents. It shows how the youngest use telecommunications services.

Children start using a mobile phone between the ages of 7 and 10 (7-8 years 38.3%, 9-10 years 41.4%). Almost every child has a smartphone (96.9%). Usually, the phone was chosen by the parents and it was mainly the parents who decided on the mobile offer. Similarly, as in 2021, almost half of parents admitted that they spend between PLN 21 and PLN 30 on their children’s phone use.

As with the phone, the majority of children use the internet apart from online education (91.3 %).

The most common age for children to start getting online is 7-8 years old (38.8 %), but as many as 23.1 % of children said they started using the Internet when they were 5-6 years old. Children spend most of their time online watching YouTube videos, playing games, surfing the web and using instant messaging and social networking sites.

Among the most common risks and dangerous behaviours resulting from a child’s Internet use, parents include: the possibility of experiencing cyberbullying, becoming a victim of fraud and coming into contact with strangers hiding their true identity.

More than half of the parents believed that their children were able to check the cost of using mobile apps, 44.1% that their children were able to shop via mobile apps. 77.8% of parents said that their children had bought games or apps themselves through mobile apps.

The majority of parents (86.8%) have talked to their child at least once about online safety. Parental control of their child’s Internet use most often took the form of jointly setting the rules of Internet use, talking to their child about their experiences, and somewhat less often using specialised parental control software/apps or configuring security settings on devices. 

Adrian Andrzejewski