The best of findings?

On the other hand, they have been doing their schoolwork, watching video clips, playing internet games, using email, visiting social network sites such as Facebook, instant messaging, and posting content to share. They have also been developing valuable skills and opportunities for the future.

This indicates that a high policy and intervention priority should be given to developing social expectations and tools around children’s acceptable online behaviour, as well as focusing upon regulatory mechanisms and parents’ adoption of technological tools, such as filters, for children younger than teenage years.

Recommended strategies for promoting safe and sociable online activity, and responding to peer-related negative events, should be age-appropriate and should address children’s online use from the youngest ages. Given that it is other children who seem to be primarily responsible for most of the experiences that bother the AU Kids Online respondents, effective self-regulation by content services – or external regulation of content services – will only make an impact on a minority of the areas of internet experience that most bother Australian children.

The research findings around skills, opportunities and internet use and access, align Australia with other wealthy developed, smaller population nations, particularly those in Scandinavia.

Whilst it is important to investigate what bothers children online, how much and for how long, it remains the case that 70 per cent of Australian children, online for an average of 99 minutes per day, say they have not come across anything online in the past 12 months that bothered them.

On the other hand, they have been doing their schoolwork, watching video clips, playing internet games, using email, visiting social network sites such as Facebook, instant messaging, and posting content to share. They have also been developing valuable skills and opportunities for the future.