When my 11-year-old son was dumped by his girlfriend on the web chat facility, MSN Messenger, he took a course of action that will probably not be open to him when he is older. He asked me, his dad, to ring her mum and sort it out.

Teenage angst over the uncertainty of human relationships may lessen as young people move from childhood to adulthood, but for the parent, the desire to protect your child never ebbs away. 

Yet the timeless urge to protect one’s children is now played out in the contemporary setting of digital connectivity and it would be naïve to assume that these new forms of communication do not matter. They matter to young people. The consumer freedoms of mobile telephony and social networking are valued precisely because these are innovations, which promise autonomy and a release from adult control.

So what does this mean for the boundaries of protection?

Over the last eighteen months, I have led work at the National Consumer Council on children’s lives as consumers.  The starting point for this work has been an engagement with young people on these dilemmas. Three key findings were:

1. Children have always had an active involvement in economic and commercial life, both as workers and consumers. The children of the nineteenth century, for example, who still come alive for us in the books of Charles Dickens, were set to work early at picking pockets, selling lace, muffins or matches, or as crossing-sweepers, clearing a way through mud and horse manure for Victorian ladies and gentlemen.

Throughout the twentieth century, children were avid consumers of sweets, comics, movies and books.  And any school playground today still operates as a showcase for the variety of entrepreneurial practices that children engage in – trading cards and toys, swapping food from lunchboxes, noting favours.

2. Amongst today’s children, a new ‘shopping generation’ has emerged.  80 per cent of those aged 10-19 years old enjoy shopping and care a lot about their games and other purchases (71 per cent). Even the youngest UK children in our survey are keen consumers. Almost eight in ten (78 per cent) of 10-12 year olds say they enjoy shopping. More than two in three like collecting the latest things that others are collecting.

As one girl put it, the feeling you get when shopping ‘reminds me of chocolates.  When you’ve bought something and you feel proud, it’s like it releases a happy hormone.’

3. That does not mean that all is well however. Young people feel they face discrimination and get treated as second-class customers by shops and companies, when compared to adults. Seven out of ten children feel they are being ‘ripped off’ by companies (71 per cent). Mobile phone companies are zero-rated for service by young consumers, making them more unpopular than doorstep salesmen.

As one boy said ‘I felt like they thought that they had more important people to deal with, like adults.’ And another girl commented, ‘They take advantage of you.  Because we’re younger and they don’t think we’re going to do anything about it.  We’re not given any respect as a customer.’

Concerns around how children experience consumer life more widely are reflected in the issue of protection in relation to mobile technology and the internet. But society appears to be deeply confused as to the rights of children as consumers. The rights of children at different age levels vary in the UK and across Europe on a number of counts. The definition of a child ranges from less than 12 years of age in the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden to less than 21 years of age in Estonia. In England, it is an old principle of law that someone under the age of eighteen cannot be bound by a contract. And yet such an age limit might appear at odds with the consumer involvement of children aged 16-18.

So what protection do young people themselves see as needed? This is the question that is perhaps most important to ask.

Our research looked at issues around marketing, on the internet and outside. We found no evidence that children want all advertising directed at them banned. But they did argue for tighter controls. And they were able to do so in an entirely sophisticated way – indeed in a far more adult way than the battle-scarred regulator Ofcom.

We all need freedom and order. The boundary between the two, particularly in new technologies, where young people are pioneers and innovators, will never be easy to settle. But, at a time of media scares and parental angst, it is important to ensure that decisions and debates are shaped by the voices and visions of young people.

Ed Mayo is chief executive of the National Consumer Council.