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Survey: Kids Start Using Social Media Before They Gain Fine Motor Skills
By
Lauren Evans
Published Feb 6, 2014
Modified Feb 6, 2014
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Piotr Wawrzyniuk/Shutterstock
By
Lauren Evans
Published Feb 6, 2014
Modified Feb 6, 2014
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There's a lot of really sad crap out there, from the near-fatal Porta Potty tippings to the DMX v. George Zimmerman Death Pee Match. But you know what really bums a person out? Little kids—little ones, with barely the dexterity to locate their nostrils with their own sticky fingers—manning their own social media accounts. And yet, 59 percent of them do, before the age of 10.
Leave it to the Daily Mail to unearth this very grim study about the online habits of near-zygotes, more than half of whom use their newly formed fingers to create Facebook accounts between the ages of 8 and 16, with 11 percent capably wielding SnapChat. (Being British, the study also delves into the use of social media networks we don't really bother with here, so we've omitted them. What's an "Ask.fm," anyway?)
Twenty-one percent of kids are using their limited, undeveloped cognitive abilities to post negative comments starting from age 11, and 26 percent have taken to hacking others' accounts and "posting without permission." The survey reports that social media development kicks off at 9-years-old, and activity steadily increases from merely looking at content to active engagement. "At nine, children first access YouTube and will use a mobile or laptop. Aged 10, they start using Internet slang (e.g. “BRB”, “YOLO”) and instant messaging."
It's all downhill after 11: That's when the first selfie goes up, along with the first nasty comment, and, by 13, they'll have dispatched their Inaugural Sext. Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin (father of two), puts it like this:
I’m just positive if the kids I grew up with had access to social media in elementary school, someone would’ve committed suicide from the bullying. Like in 4th grade, we read Blubber, a book about a fat girl who gets bullied—but she’s the protagonist of the book. Of course the class took the lesson to be that you should call fat girls names, which they promptly did. It was like a shark tank! On Facebook someone would have died.
Gothamist executive editor Jen Chung (mother of one), says she hopes social media is "dead" by the time her 4-year-old daughter hits selfie-age. "I want my kid to, like, read a book or build a fortress for our cats instead of social networking," she said. I sent her the survey, helpfully highlighting the portion that plots the timeline of sexting.
"Yeah," she wrote back. "That's why I sort of hope the moon colony I escape to won't have wifi."
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sexting
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Lauren Evans
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