arents are wired. And it's not just because their children keep them jangled and exhausted. A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington has found that parents with children under 18 are more likely to have used the Internet than nonparents; they are also more enthusiastic about technology, and they fret less about it than their child-free peers.
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The study, to be released today, is a synthesis of several years of findings.
Fully 70 percent of parents have gone online, as opposed to 53 percent of nonparents, the researchers found. They also discovered that parents say they are more likely than nonparents to use the Internet to find information about health or religion, or to engage in online banking and in research for work.
But despite those findings, parents are slightly less likely to use the Internet on a typical day compared with Internet-using nonparents, the survey found. Parents spent an average of 81 minutes online in an average day, while nonparents surfed an average of 94 minutes.
The survey found that mothers, who tend to be newer users of the Internet, spend more time looking for health information, while fathers tend to look for news and for leisure information.
The survey shows that the Internet "doesn't add up to a revolution in parenting," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet center. But it does show that the Internet is "another tool that parents are using, sometimes to some advantage in their lives."
Mr. Rainie said that parents probably picked up their technological knowledge and skills by watching their children, by having to provide tech support for them and through that form of cultural osmosis that clues them in to what's important to their children. (Which is also, by the way, why parents know anything about Avril Lavigne.)
He said the exposure to online technology that parents picked up through their experiences with their children translated into more focused and productive use of the Internet to pursue their interests.
Why, then, do these techno-savvy parents spend slightly less time online than their nonparent counterparts? Here's a suggestion: they get tired of fighting with their children over the mouse. And once teenagers start using instant messaging, the parents can't get on the machines at all.
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arents are wired. And it's not just because their children keep them jangled and exhausted. A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington has found that parents with children under 18 are more likely to have used the Internet than nonparents; they are also more enthusiastic about technology, and they fret less about it than their child-free peers. 
