The Effects of the Internet on Children Research Paper

The Effects of the Internet on Children - Research Paper Example The internet is one of the most influential developments of the modern world mainly because it affects the lives of almost everybody in the world. It is fast becoming a major source of information with many people relying on it to get news from all over the world, for research, to do market research and make purchases and to keep in touch with one another over great distances. The internet provides a powerful tool for online resources and is an information dissemination tool for many people in the world. Recent researches have shown an increase in the number of children who access the internet everyday in the United States. These children are exposed to many databases, which may sometimes hold explicit, violent, prohibited and at times illegal content. Statistics show that in China, many children come to be exposed to the internet and gadgets related to it from an extremely early age. Parents in this country have been known, in recent times, to buy iPads for their toddlers, something which was not common only a few years ago (Hairong, 2012, Para 7). Surveys in China have also shown that the number of families, which have acquired iPads for their children, is about forty percent, which is a unique fact indeed. While many children have come to access the internet from an early age, they have also come to be exposed to things within it, which are harmful to their mental development. (Hairong 2012 Para 12). In order to help parents curb the children’s access to the internet, internet service providers and major search engines have created tools to enable parents to input parental control measures on the child’s computer at home. Recent research shows that majorities of parents use parental control, and this helps to filter and control the sites that children can access and set safe zones for them. The major setback for this has been that children have been seen to adapt very fast to these software and tools. In addition, they have been known to find w ays of penetrating passwords or firewalls set by parents and access restricted sites (Siegel, 2012 Para 16). The amount of time that children spend on the internet has been found to be detrimental to their mental development because it has made them become too lazy to be creative. Studies conducted at Duke University show that children who spend too much time online tend to have low scores in the test they are given in school (Scholastic News, 201