Research has found that one in three boys aged eight are playing over-18 games online.
The findings are released by Zeeko, an Irish Ed-tech company, and are based on data collected between September and November 2018 in primary schools throughout Ireland.
Zeeko’s latest research for its latest ‘Digital Behaviour Trends’ research report also shows that younger children now have access to the internet earlier when compared to their older peers.
The study claims they start accessing the internet on average between 6 and 7 years of age (6.3 years), with around 15% of primary school children spending between one and three hours per day online during weekdays with this increasing to more than five hours online in 16% of cases at weekends.
Research findings also indicate that although 33% of boys in 2nd class have played an 18+ game, this figure increases to 60% by 6th class, while boys play online games three times more than girls.
Joe Kenny, founder of Zeeko, said: “At Zeeko, we normally bring out the results of our in-school research findings every January. However, this finding that 1 in 3 of 8-year old boys are playing over 18 games caused a stir amongst our research team. Given, we are coming to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the big online sales, where game buying is enormous, closely followed by the Christmas sales season, we felt we had to share this finding.
“Zeeko is an ethical company and many of our staff are parents, so we felt this information, based on research, as current as last week, had to be communicated. Hopefully, by sharing this finding now it may encourage parents, and indeed older siblings, to be more vigilant and to think carefully when purchasing games online.”
The research involved a total of 6,847 children (3,050 boys and 3,797 girls).
- Digital Desk
