London - Children as young as four are being allowed to surf the web unsupervised.
However, parents whose children are now teenagers took a much stricter attitude when their offspring were younger.
They did not let them use the internet alone until they were almost 12.
The survey of more than 2 000 parents shows how rapidly attitudes to the internet have shifted in little more than a decade.
The poll found that, on average, parents with children under the age of six now only wait until they are four-and-a-half before they leave them to go online without supervision. Whilst many will simply be watching cartoons on iPads or smartphones, others are bound to stumble across unsuitable websites and videos.
What is more, millions of households have done nothing to limit the kinds of websites their children can access at home, according to the research.
Four out of 10 British parents still do not have internet controls in place to block pornographic or other inappropriate content. Those who do are concerned that their children can navigate around them.
A fifth of parents who put the controls in place said their children could get past them before the age of six, whilst nearly half of parents (43 percent) do not think the porn filters are tough enough for teenagers.
Around the same number believe their children are far more tech-savvy than them, while a fifth of British parents worry that their own impoverished technology skills could be putting their children at risk. However, access to online porn is not the only danger of having too much internet access too young.
Psychologists claim it can interfere with children’s sleep, and adversely affect their concentration at school. Parents are also worried about the impact using the internet has on their children’s mental health and ability to interact with others in the real world.
More than a third of parents surveyed for the consumer website uSwitch fear these could be impaired, while one in ten parents think at least one of their children has already become so divorced from reality that their social skills have suffered.
The other great concern for parents are their children’s job prospects.
One in ten parents of teenagers worry that their children have “overshared” on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter – potentially leaving photographs and comments that could one day deter a future employer.
Daily Mail