I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the problem of filtering content to make sure kids don’t get exposed to undesirable stuff from the net on their phones. With a computer, there’s loads of filtering options, including perhaps the most effective of keeping it in a communal part of the house and making a point of looking over their shoulders, from time to time.

With a mobile phone, it’s essentially a personal, private medium and unless you’re the kind of parent who never lets your child out of your sight until they’re 18, this is going to cause a problem. How big this problem will really be and how much inflated by the media and activist parental and religious groups it’s hard to say right now.

A new survey by Ace highlights the problem, admittedly by way of promoting their service - that’s right, ParentPatrol (TM), which allows parents to control how their kids use the phone. Having said that, the research does appear to be genuine enough, based on an online survey of 1,000 kids.

Here’s some of the findings:

71% claimed to have unsupervised and unrestricted access to their mobile phone
38% claimed to send sms to friends during school
30% played games during school
26% used their phone to talk to people their parents wouldn’t approve of
Kids spend as much time on their phones as they do on physical activity (that little, huh?)

The ParentPatrol product does sound pretty good and flexible, if this is the kind of way you think it best to manage your kids. You can restrict access and use to certain times, specify permitted numbers or allow an agreed number of minutes usage. All this can be done via a web interface, that your average teenager will probably hack before you’ve worked out how to log on to it.

The survey also highlights the best way to punish these pesky kids. As I’ve pointed out before, banning them mobile access is far more effective than say banning them from TV or their iPods - or that most old-fashioned punishment, grounding. Take away their phones and you’ve ruined their social, dating and sex life. It’s the disciplinary equivalent of going nuclear.

As the market for kids’ mobiles increases though, I can’t help feeling that a better solution to all this is to stop kids using phones altogether until they’re old enough to be responsible and won’t be too traumatised by some of the content they’ll get exposed to - maybe 16. Added to this is the ambiguous health risks concerning kids’ usage of phones. Plus the issue highlighted by Carlo, writing over at TechDirt, where some terminally misguided parents are using phones as a cheap substitute for proper and responsible child care.

At the risk of sounding like an old fart (as well as looking like one) should we consider banning mobile ownership under a certain age, like we ban cigarettes, driving, having sex and adult material? While it obviously wouldn’t be popular with the kids - the politicians wouldn’t care, as kids can’t vote. And it might actually be a real vote winner with many of the parents.

I think that this might actually happen. Not everywhere. But some countries and certainly some States in the US will seriously consider and maybe even legislate over age controls for mobile phones within the next 5 years.

The image comes from Family Safe Media, which sell a variety of tech solutions to protect your little darlings. These range for the I am Big Brother software (does this mean that it arrests them and extracts a confession by torturing them with rats?) to profanity filters for your TV, DVD etc. Wonders will never cease. Image disappeared!