Nothing new there I suppose, but the actual figures are quite interesting. For instance, a quarter of children aged 8-12 who use the internet at home say they have a profile on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace, all of which have an age restriction of 13.  Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that 83 per cent of these children have their profile set so that it can only be seen by friends, and 4 per cent have a profile that can’t be seen – is this the generation that’s going to show the rest of us how it’s done?

Another very encouraging figure is that nine in ten parents of these children who are aware that their child visits social networking sites (93 per cent) also say that they check what their child is doing on these types of sites. It wasn’t that long ago that most parents were fairly clueless in this space. In terms of usage, Blogs or sites like Wikipedia where people can add or change information are visited by one in five (18 per cent) of 8-11s and half of 12-15s (48 per cent) who use the internet at home.

For more info, you can see the press release here and download the report here