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Infant school children are increasingly online and given more digital independence by parents, according to Ofcom’s annual study of children’s relationship with the media and online worlds.

• Children aged 5 to 7 increasingly present online – a third use social media unsupervised, and growing number have personal profiles
• Three-quarters of parents talk to younger children about staying safe online
• Ofcom signals plans to develop additional proposals on how AI can be used to detect illegal content and harms to children

Compared to a year ago, a higher proportion of 5-7s go online to send messages or make voice/video calls (59% to 65%) or to watch live-streamed content (39% to 50%).

Similarly, overall use of social media sites or apps among all 5-7s has increased year-on-year (30% to 38%), with WhatsApp (29% to 37%), TikTok (25% to 30%), Instagram (14% to 22%) and Discord (2% to 4%) seeing particular growth among this age group.

Online gaming among 5-7 year-olds has also seen a significant annual increase – 41%, up from 34% – with more children of this age playing shooter games than ever before (15%, up from 10%).

Today’s research comes as Ofcom prepares to consult in the coming weeks on a comprehensive set of proposals to ensure children are better protected online. Additionally, Ofcom is today announcing an additional area of focus for child safety, building on the robust measures set out in our draft illegal harms Codes of Practice.

Specifically, we are planning an additional consultation later this year on how automated tools, including AI, can be used to proactively detect illegal content and content most harmful to children – including previously undetected child sexual abuse material.

Solo on social

While around two in five parents of 5-7 year-olds (42%) say they use social media sites and apps together with their child, a third (32%) report that their child uses social media independently.

Compared to last year, parents of these younger children are more likely to say they would allow their child to have a profile on social media services before they had reached the minimum age required (30%, up from 25%).

It follows that more children of this age now have their own personal profiles on YouTube or YouTube Kids (48%, from 39%), WhatsApp (11%, from 7%) and Instagram (9%, from 5%) than a year ago.

Talking and learning about online safety

Three-quarters of parents of children aged 5-7 who go online say they have talked to their child about staying safe online (76%), and over half do so at least every few weeks (56%). Parents of older children who go online (those aged 8-17) are more likely to have ever had online safety conversations with their child (over 90% of parents of children in each age band).

The research suggests a disconnect between older children’s exposure to potentially harmful content online, and what they share with their parents about their online experiences. A third (32%) of 8-17s say they have seen something worrying or nasty online in the last 12 months, but only 20% of parents of this age group report their child telling them they had seen something online that scared or upset them in the same time frame.

Notably, all girls aged 8-17 are more likely than boys of the same age to experience nasty or hurtful interactions online, both via text or messaging apps (20% vs 14%) and social media (18% vs 13%).

Over nine in ten children aged 8-17 who go online (93%) can recall having had at least one lesson about online safety at school – of which three-quarters (76%) said it was useful to them. This rises to 97% among the 30% of children who had regular online safety lessons.

Protecting children under the Online Safety Act

While online safety education is one part of the drive to keep young people safer online, under the Online Safety Act tech firms have a legal responsibility to keep children safer online. We are clear they must be ready to meet their new duties once in force and stand ready to hold them to account.

We are working at pace to implement the new laws. With regard to the child safety duties under the Act, we are:

• launching a consultation in May on our draft Children’s Safety Code of Practice. This will set out the practical steps that we expect tech firms to take to ensure children have safer experiences online - including by protecting them from content that is legal but harmful to children, such as content promoting suicide or self-harm, and pornography; and
• planning an additional consultation later this year on how automated detection tools, including AI, can be used to mitigate the risk of illegal harms and content most harmful to children - including previously undetected child sexual abuse material and content encouraging suicide and self-harm. These proposals will draw on our growing technical evidence base and build on the existing measures set out in our illegal harms draft Codes of Practice.

From sensory to the sensationalist – top online behavioural trends revealed

Today’s research studies – including our 10th annual qualitative Children’s Media Lives report – reveal a number of other behavioural trends. These include:

Passive use of social media: Children aged 8-17 who use social media are significantly more likely to do so passively by ‘liking’ or ‘following’ other accounts (44%), rather than being active users who share, comment, or post content (28%). Participants in the qualitive study who did share content they created themselves, tended to do so strategically – for example, by only sharing posts temporarily on their stories, or among a select, smaller circle of friends on private social media accounts.

Stimulating, speedy, split-screen content: Stimulating, shortform videos with fast-paced choppy edits, featuring loud, dramatic, and exaggerated personas, continued to capture the attention of children in our qualitive study. Split-screen – and now triple-screen videos in one case – remain a feature of their viewing diet. We also observed several children using TikTok’s ‘fast-forward’ feature to race through videos at double speed.

Girls favour ‘soothing’ sensory videos: In contrast, there has been a rise in the number of qualitative study participants – specifically girls – watching autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos which offer tactile sensory stimulation at a much slower pace. These include interpersonal ‘point of view’ videos where a content creator appears to whisper directly to the viewer, role-play a friend, or stroke their hair. The children say they watch these videos to relax, or to help them go to sleep, but at least one said they were staying up late watching one after another.

Real versus fake: Older teens are finding it harder to distinguish the real from the fake online. Children aged 16-17 years old are less confident in their ability to distinguish the real from the fake online than they were last year (75% vs 82%).

You can find out more by visiting Ofcom’s news centre.

Notes to editors:

Making Sense of Media is Ofcom’s media literacy programme of work to help improve the online skills, knowledge and understanding of UK adults and children. The four research studies published today are a core component of this programme.

Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes 2024 provides evidence on media use, attitudes and understanding among children aged 3-17 in the UK, as well as parents’ perspective of their child’s (age 3-17) media behaviours and the strategies they rely on to protect their child online. The tracker comprises three surveys: children’s online behaviour and attitudes (sample size: 3,383), children’s online knowledge and understanding (sample size: 2,080), and the parents-only survey (sample size: 2,480).

Children’s Media Lives 2024 provides a rich and detailed qualitative complement to Ofcom’s quantitative surveys of media literacy. It covers the motivations and context for media use and how media interacts with daily life and the domestic circumstances of the children in the study. It is a longitudinal study based on a sample of 21 children – as far as possible, it follows the same group of children aged 8 to 17, conducting filmed interviews with them each year to find out about their media habits and attitudes and how they might have changed.

Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes 2024 provides evidence on media use, attitudes and understanding among UK adults. The tracker comprises three surveys: the core survey (sample size: 3,643), online behaviour and attitudes (sample size: 6,182), and online knowledge and understanding (sample size: 3,093).

Adults’ Media Lives 2024 provides a rich and detailed qualitative complement to Ofcom’s quantitative surveys of media literacy on the motivations and context for media use and how media interacts with daily life and the domestic circumstances of the adults in the study. It is a longitudinal, ethnographic project which has been running since 2005. The research follows 20 participants over time – with 12 of them having been in the study for at least 15 years – interviewing them at home to understand their relationship with digital media. This year, interviews of up to 90 minutes were mostly conducted face-to-face in home, with three interviews being held over Zoom.