Parents are becoming more and more comfortable with their children having profiles on social-media sites. A new study shows that the number of parents that permit their pre-teen kids have accounts on sites like Facebook or MySpace has more than doubled in just a year.
A survey of about 1,000 adults conducted by Liberty Mutual's Responsibility Project revealed that 17 percent of parents have no problem with a child using social media. That's quite an increase from last year's rate of eight percent, Reuters notes.
Most of the parents polled (90 percent) said they are frequent Facebook users, and an additional 11 percent of respondents disclosed that they use social media on behalf of a child or infant.
It's a notable statistic, considering the minimum age to join Facebook is 13. However, Facebook lacks any kind of method for verifying users' ages, which means kids can join by simply providing a false birthday. According to Liberty Mutual's poll, the parents don't seem to mind.
However, their activity is not totally unrestricted. A third of the parents polled said they monitor the social media activity of kids ages 18 and under. An additional 44 percent also restrict children's texting and Internet usage.
The poll also found that most of the parents recognize that they're responsible to step in if they feel that their child is a victim of cyber bullying, and 63 percent said that schools should do more to prevent this behavior.
Facebook has said it attempts to stop underage activity on the site. Earlier this year, Facebook said it removes about 20,000 profiles every day, some of which belong to users that are younger than 13.