Use of e-mail by Canadian youth, aged 9-17

E-mail is popular among kids, but parents aren't fully aware of this:

• 71 per cent of kids have an e-mail account.
  
  
• Kids with e-mail usually (81 per cent) have free accounts such as Hotmail or Yahoo!
  
  
• 56 per cent of kids say that getting and sending e-mail messages is their favourite online activity.
  
  
• But the number of parents aware that their children send and receive e-mail messages is only 18 per cent.
  
  
• A quarter of elementary students with e-mail accounts, and almost half of secondary students, say their parents don't know about all their accounts.
  
  
• Most e-mail activity among kids is with friends, but 45 per cent say they "often" or "sometimes" e-mail people they've met only on the Internet.

Offensive material in email

Kids generally react to offensive material in e-mail by ignoring it:

• Among secondary school kids, two in ten (21 per cent) say they have rules about saying insulting things in their instant messaging or e-mail.
  
  
• But 25 per cent also say that someone else has e-mailed them material saying hateful things about others.
  
  
• Of these, 35 per cent did nothing about it, and only 9 per cent told an adult.
  
  
• Nearly two in ten kids (16 per cent) have received e-mail that bothered them, from someone they didn't know.
  
  
• Almost 70 per cent of these kids dealt with disturbing e-mails on their own, while only 20 per cent told an adult.
  
  
• More than half of secondary school kids say they "sometimes" or "often" receive pornographic junk mail via e-mail or instant messaging.
  
  
• Among kids of all ages who received pornographic junk mail, only two in ten told their parents about it.

Young Canadians in a Wired World: The Students' View 2001 is a nationwide investigation of Internet use among Canadian youth that explores what kids do online, how they perceive the Internet, and what they know about it.

Canada's Children in a Wired World: The Parents' View 2000 is a nationwide survey of more than 1,000 Canadian parents, who were asked about their perceptions of the Internet and their awareness of the benefits and risks it offers their children. Selected findings from the parent survey are compared to data from the student survey.