By AYUMI SUGIYAMA/ Staff Writer
April 14, 2022 at 08:00 JST
High school girls use the Line messaging app installed on their smartphones in Niigata’s Chuo Ward. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Japanese children are switching on earlier than they used to, according to a survey to ascertain when kids first start to use smartphones.
Mobile Society Research Institute, an arm of leading mobile carrier NTT Docomo Inc., said a study it did last November found that children on average were 10.63 years old when they first operated a smartphone, down 0.71 year from two years earlier.
The institute zeroed in on elementary and junior high school students as well as their parents in Tokyo and six prefectures in the Kanto region. It received 500 valid responses.
The results showed that children on average were given their first smartphone when they were 10.63 years old. The average age was 11.34 in the previous survey in 2019.
By gender, girls and boys became smartphone owners at ages 10.47 and 10.83, respectively. Most of them started bringing their devices to school at age 12, around the time they entered junior high, accounting for 33.2 percent of the total.
Simple-to-use cellphones oriented toward children that feature a personal alarm, location notification and other helpful functions were introduced to young users when they were 8.09 years old on average, a year younger than the figure for the 2019 study of 9.11.
Although girls were prone to begin relying on such devices earlier in 2019, no significant difference was reported between genders in 2021.
Most of them got children’s easy-to-use smartphones at ages 6 and 7 after they were enrolled in elementary school.
Last year, the telecommunications ministry said a survey it carried out in fiscal 2020 found that 98.8 percent of high school students own a smartphone. It said users who spent six hours or more on their smartphones on holidays totaled 28.0 percent.
The ministry has been urging parents to control the number of hours their offspring spend on smartphones as well as install a filtering function.
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