Does tech help kids?: Study

Researchers are having a tough time catching up with the breathtaking speed of kids' adoption of the Net and technology, but this year they've made some strides with three significant studies. The latest, released today, is from The Children's Partnership (TCP), which spent the past year looking at a question that hasn't been asked enough: "How can the Internet help America's children succeed?" It found that, while the Net and "technology tools" are "enhancing successful outcomes for young people, they are also seriously disadvantaging those young people without access and the skills to use them. However," it continued, "when low-income children do have these tools, they use them to gain opportunities for themselves at higher rates than wealthier young people." That was one of the most thought-provoking findings - interesting to consider alongside the earlier Kaiser Family Foundation's study about our "media-saturated" youth (see my 3/11 issue). As for kids' adoption of tech, TCP found that "over the past 10 years, the number of kids accessing the Internet from home has grown from 15% to 68%; 77% of 7-to-17-year-old US residents have computers at home and 90% at school. Here's further fresh research, about parental controls, from the Pew Internet & American Life project. And here's the executive summary of and press release for TCP's "Measuring Digital Opportunity for America's Children."