Preventing internet overuse by children

"Take the PC out of the child's immediate living area and put it in the hallway," said Rainer Thomasius, director of the German Centre for Addiction Research in Childhood and Adolescence at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, dpa reported.

Speaking recently at the Didacta education trade fair in Cologne, Thomasius said that keeping the home computer at a central location was an effective way to prevent children from spending too much time online. The parents and child would also do well to agree on a weekly schedule of permissible times for going online, he added.

Citing what he said were international guidelines, Thomasius said that children under the age of 12 should not surf the internet alone at all. For a child in this age group, the computer therefore belongs in the home's common living area and not in the child's bedroom.

A maximum of one hour of internet use a day is recommended for children between the ages of 11 and 13, and one and a half hours for those aged 14 and older.

When is a child's internet use excessive? At what point can it be called an addiction? There are no diagnostic criteria to determine this, Thomasius noted, adding that general signs did exist, however. He said that parents should be concerned if their child had trouble controlling the beginning, duration and end of an internet session and kept increasing the amount of time online, Kazinform cites Trend News. See www.en.trend.az for full version.