How teenagers surf

Cell phones kill concentration at school

89% of eleven to 18-year-olds already have their own smartphone.

(Bild: Wenzel Markus)

The standard of teaching has dropped! This development was reportedly outlined by a concerned primary school teacher in Linz in the "Krone" newspaper. The teacher cited children's increasing media consumption as one reason for this. How widespread is smartphone use among teenagers really?

Barbara Buchegger, educational director of the safer-internet.at initiative, explains the connection as follows: "Children are used to different standards earlier and earlier, from films and media content. Then the school comes along with graphically unexciting offers on paper. It's just not that exciting, so the motivation is endless."

Children can still concentrate: When playing computer games, they concentrate for hours at a very high level.

Barbara Buchegger, Initiative saferinternet.at

Teenagers surf for more than two hours a day
But how long do children really spend on their cell phones these days? The Upper Austrian Youth Media Study commissioned by the Education Group, for which 500 young people between the ages of eleven and 18 were surveyed last year, sheds light on this. According to the study, teenagers spend two hours and ten minutes a day on the internet. In 2011, this online time was still a good hour.

Fittingly, only one in five young people had their own cell phone in 2011. Now, nine out of ten children have a smartphone.

Parents are being urged to use a "digital pacifier"
Parents are not aware of everything that happens online: More than a third of teenagers don't tell mom and dad about things they experience on social media. By the way, the most popular social network by far is WhatsApp (used by 86%).

To counteract the cell phone trend, expert Buchegger advocates letting children be "loud and lively" again. For example, when eating in a restaurant. Because: "We are less and less accepting that children have a right to be loud and are increasingly forcing parents to make them quiet with the digital pacifier."