Over the past decade, children's access to and use of the internet and mobile devices has increased dramatically. Ofcom (2015) reports that around two thirds of children aged 8–15 years had access to the internet at home in 2005, rising to nine in every ten children by 2015. At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, smartphones were still relatively novel and the iPad had just been released on the market, but children very quickly took possession of, and began using, these devices. Smartphone ownership among children aged 8–11 years rose from 13 per cent in 2010 to 24 per cent in 2015. Comparable figures for children aged 12–15 years are 35 per cent and 69 per cent respectively. Furthermore, children in the UK have a high rate of smartphone ownership compared with children in other European countries (Mascheroni and Ólafsson, 2016). In addition, there have been markedly steep increases in children's access to and ownership of tablet computers in recent years. Ofcom report that around 5 per cent of children aged 5–15 years had access to a tablet in 2010, which increased to 80 per cent in 2015, and children's ownership of tablets rose from 2 per cent to 40 per cent over the same period (Ofcom, 2015). Running parallel with these changes in the available hardware, internet speeds and capacities have improved steadily, enhancing the functionality of mobile devices, with the consequence that children increasingly use these devices to access the internet (Livingstone et al, 2014).

The UK Time Use Surveys, collected around 2000 and 2015, capture these changes in children's access to computer technology and the internet in the home. Table 5.1 shows the proportion of children living in a home with a computer and access to the internet at each time point, broken down by child age and parental education. In 2000, around 70 per cent of children aged 8–11 years and 81.5 per cent of children aged 12–16 years lived in a house with a computer.