Children's presence on the Internet starting at younger and younger ages

My coming of age, thankfully, preceded the days of social networking. I think a lot of us who graduated from college or high school prior to the rise of websites like Facebook and MySpace are thankful that our formative (read: idiotic) teenage experiences aren’t posted on the web for all to see.

The next generation, though, probably won’t be so lucky. It’s bad enough when pictures of you as a 16-year-old at a backwoods kegger get plastered on the Internet, but what if some earlier embarrassing photos were online? Say, your potty-training days?

Apparently that is the fate of over 37 per cent of Canadian toddlers, and a shocking 92 per cent of American ones. Children, usually through their parents, are present on the Internet at a younger and younger age — whether they realize it or not.

And of course, it’s “not;” especially when sonogram images are the first images of you on the web.

AVG conducted the study, and shared some other interesting findings:

Almost a quarter (23%) of children begin their digital lives when parents upload their prenatal sonogram scans to the Internet. This figure is higher in the US, where 34 percent have posted sonograms online, while in Canada the figure is even higher at 37 percent. Fewer parents share sonograms of their children in France (13%), Italy (14%) and Germany (15%). Likewise only 14 percent of parents share these online in Japan.

Seven percent of babies and toddlers have an email address created for them by their parents, and five percent have a social network profile.

When asked what motivates parents to post images of their babies on the Internet, more than 70 percent of all mothers surveyed said it was to share with friends and family. However, more than a fifth (22%) of mothers in the US said they wanted to add more content to their social network profiles, while 18 percent of US mothers said they were simply following their peers.

It’s an interesting trend, to be sure, but I can see a lot of upside to this sort of early exposure to the Internet. If parents are teaching their children from a young age, taking a hands-on approach to the Internet, we can certainly expect them to be more Internet savvy by the time they hit their pre-teen years. They might better learn about appropriate boundaries for social networking, and maybe it will be a motivator for their offline lives. What kid wouldn’t want to post pictures of their soccer trophies online or dance recital photos?

And besides, what are the worst things elementary school children could post about on a website like Facebook? I imagine their status updates would be along these lines:

• Billy Smith is hating homework!!! division sux!!!11
• Kelli McCartney is in a complicated relationship with vegetables.
• Steven Holt added new photos to the album “Boom booms in my pants”
• Alex Tao likes SpongeBob SquarePants, Stickers and 13 other pages