What Kids Actually Do Online — By Age Band

Discussions about children and the internet tend to cluster at two poles: confident alarm about harm and harm potential, or equally confident dismissal of concern as generational anxiety. Neither posture is well-supported by the research evidence, which is more nuanced, more hedged, and in some important respects genuinely uncertain than either position suggests.

This topic is written for parents. It presents what the best available large-scale research shows about how children of different ages actually use the internet — what platforms they use, how much time they spend, what activities they engage in, and how patterns have changed since 2020. Where the research is uncertain or contested, that is noted. Where findings are robust and consistent across multiple studies, that is noted too.

The goal is to give you a more accurate picture than you are likely to get from either a newspaper headline or a reassuring app developer.

The data sources this topic draws on

Three large-scale research programmes provide the most reliable ongoing data on children's internet use:

• Ofcom Children's Media Use and Attitudes (CMUA) survey (UK): An annual survey of around 3,500 children aged 3–17 and their parents or carers. The 2024 report covers data collected in late 2023 and is the most comprehensive source on UK children's media use (Ofcom, 2024).
• Common Sense Media Census (US): A biennial national survey of children and teenagers aged 8–18. The 2023 Census covers approximately 1,500 participants (Common Sense Media, 2023).
• EU Kids Online network: A multi-country academic research network coordinated through the London School of Economics, led by Professor Sonia Livingstone. EU Kids Online has produced comparative data across European countries since 2006, with a major wave in 2019–2020 and updates since (Smahel et al., 2020).

Additional research from Professor Andrew Przybylski and colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is referenced where it addresses specific contested questions — particularly around screen time and wellbeing.

The difference between 'screen time' and 'internet use'

Much public discussion uses 'screen time' as if it were a meaningful single variable. Researchers studying children's media use are largely agreed that it is not. Przybylski and Weinstein (2017) demonstrated that the relationship between screen use and adolescent wellbeing is extremely weak and non-linear — and crucially, that the type and context of screen use matters far more than total hours.

Watching a video together with a parent, using a communication app to talk to grandparents, playing a creative game independently, and scrolling social media at night are all 'screen time' — but they are as different from each other as walking to school, driving at motorway speed, and sitting in a traffic jam are all 'being in or near a road.' Aggregating them into a single number obscures almost everything that matters.

This topic will use screen time data where it is the best available measure — as a rough indicator of scale — while being explicit about what the numbers can and cannot tell us.

A note on the moral panic question

The term 'moral panic' — coined by sociologist Stanley Cohen (1972) and developed in the media context by researchers including Sonia Livingstone — refers to a disproportionate societal response to a perceived threat, often involving exaggeration, misidentification of causes, and simplified attribution of blame. Livingstone and colleagues have documented that each new communications technology (from television to video games to social media) has prompted a similar pattern of adult alarm about children's exposure.

This observation does not mean that concerns about children's online experiences are baseless — some documented harms are real and evidence-based. It means that the scale and nature of harm is often significantly different from what dominates public discourse. Both the dismissal of all concern as panic and the acceptance of all concern as fact are inaccurate responses to the evidence.