Yes, while you might think that the hugely popular dating app is reserved for adults, new research has proven that Irish teens are far more au-fait with the app than you may have previously thought.
The survey, carried out by Irish study website Styudyclix, across almost 5,000 secondary school students, found that 13% of teens in the country are using the app to socialise.
Research pinpointed County Cork as having the highest number of secondary school students using the online app, accounting for over a fifth (22%) of users.
Co-founder of Studyclix, Luke Saunders, said that he was shocked by the feedback from the nationwide survey.
“I couldn’t believe it. One of my third year students showed it to me on their phone. It’s risky and you can get adults pretending to be in that age bracket on the app,” he said.
He added that, naturally, teenagers’ use of the app calls internet security into question; the statistics of the survey regarding the overall use of smartphones appear to have compacted this, also.
Indeed, with over half of Irish students (55%) admitting to being “addicted to their phone”, Saunders said that it highlights how vigilant we, as parents, need to be.
“As a secondary school teacher, it is very clear to me in my day-to-day teaching that the use of phones in school has increased and is very hard to monitor or safeguard,” he added.
In another alarming statistic, the survey revealed that almost a quarter of students in Ireland had witnessed cyber-bullying in the last school year, while over half (56%) of students named school as the most stressful thing in their lives.
This certainly provides food for thought. These are issues that keep emerging again and again, and it highlights even further how vigilant we need to be.
