Parental punishment today: No Internet!

Instead of ‘No TV for a week,’ to punish their kids, more and more parents are saying, ‘No Internet or TV,’ says a new study from the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California.

Today’s parents are making less and less of a distinction between television and the Internet. While two thirds of parents restrict their kids’ access to TV as punishment – a number that hasn’t changed in the last decade, the number of parents who also ban Internet use has almost doubled.

Researchers at USC’s Annenberg Center for the Digital Future reported these findings after an April 2010 survey of approximately 2,000 Americans.

The study found that in recent years, traditional parental punishment has changed. While 32 per cent of parents restricted access to the computer in 2000, ten years later, that number has almost doubled to 57 per cent.

With the growth of social networking and young people spending more and more time online, parents say they find computer use less intrusive than television.

According to 71 per cent of parents surveyed, the time their children spent on the Internet was "just right,” as opposed to only 51 per cent who felt that way about television.