Children cannot be protected from risk but parents must be educated in the dangers posed by the internet, the Government’s parenting guru has said.

Tanya Byron, the clinical psychologist and television personality, described details of the report that Gordon Brown asked her to conduct into the impact of violent computer games and the internet on children.

Speaking at the Oxford Media Convention, she said that new technologies had created a generation gap between parents and children. “Parents are worried about online predators, but children are more concerned about bullying and they don’t differentiate between the real world and online. It starts in the classroom and, when they get home, it’s all over their MySpace page,” she said.

Dr Byron has talked with children, parents and industry bodies for her report, commissioned after the Prime Minister expressed concern at the impact of violence seen by children in their leisure time.

Dr Byron said: “When your kid is using the internet, you have opened the door to another world. Would you let an eight-year-old walk to the shops without teaching them how to cross the road?” Her research found that parents had little idea how to place filters on their child’s computer to protect them from inappropriate material.

Parents were also easily manipulated by their offspring into buying unsuitable computer games. A ten-year-old will tell a parent that a game labelled “15” merely indicates a higher skill level, she found. One parent called for a “watershed” for the internet, similar to television, as if such a restriction were possible.

There was a “moral panic” about violence on children’s screens, Dr Byron said, but she found that playing computer games with some violent content could have a beneficial impact. She said: “Children said they found it a cathartic expression of emotion to act out these scenes in a game.”

Dr Byron’s report, delivered next month, is expected to recommend a single classification system for video games. She is also seeking agreement by game producers that their products will be marketed in a responsible and nonsensationalist manner.

But, if the Prime Minister was hoping to discover draconian solutions to the problem, Dr Byron is unlikely to deliver them. She said that there was “no silver bullet” to the problem, and her solutions are likely to focus on greater information for parents and voluntary actions from the computer and gaming industries.

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