Age Guide for Teaching Kids Online Safety

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This post is part of our Big Conversations series, a guide to help parents navigate the most important conversations they will have with their children. Read more here .

This is one of the most universal parental fears, a necessary evil from which we cannot protect our children for long, because we know that they will have to live and work in this world as adults. I’m talking, of course, about the Internet. From the moment they hobble around and try to snatch our own phones from our hands, to their teenage years when most of their social life takes place online, we have a few precious years to teach our kids how to navigate the internet. the world as safe as possible.

To find out how, I spoke with Devorah Heitner , author of Screenwise: Helping Children Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World and the forthcoming book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World . I will also provide some additional resources for each age group along the way.

Teaching Preschoolers Online Safety Rules

Even before they’re old enough to text friends, post on social media, or play servers with strangers around the world, it’s important to start modeling healthy use of technology. Hytner says the first thing preschoolers need to understand is that we use technology in front of them all the time. They know we take pictures and videos of them with our phones, they see us scrolling endlessly while they splash in the tub, and they might even bring us our phones when we leave them in another room because they know how important it is. this device.

“It’s very important, especially at this age, to be aware of how much we model our own digital behaviors and connections,” she says.

And we also need to think about what we are not modeling. Parents in their 30s and older probably grew up with a family landline that everyone used and communicated much more publicly than we do today. Without even realizing it, our parents were modeling for us some basic norms and manners of talking on the phone and talking.

“We have a lot of osmosis communication practice, and kids don’t have that right now,” Heitner says. Because of this, she recommends that parents start teaching these manners at an early age, starting with conversations about how we say “hello” at the beginning of a call and “goodbye” when it’s time to go (and don’t leave in the middle of a conversation). – passageway). We can start explaining to them why we can’t call someone when it’s too late or too early, or when we might want to call instead of text or Facetime someone, and 4 or 5 years isn’t too much. young to start giving these lessons. Hytner says.

Modeling healthy technology usage habits and communication skills early on—before they have their own smart devices—will provide a good foundation for when they begin to navigate apps, games, and chats in years to come.

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Teaching kids ages 5-8 about online safety

In the early early years, children often have a little more freedom to watch videos, play games, and connect with friends and family members. Heitner says the first thing to bring to the attention of children at this age is that if they see something upsetting or scary online, they should let you know and, most importantly, reassure them that they won’t in danger. problems with it.

“We really don’t want to scare children away from reporting,” she says. “So we have to make sure we are very clear that they don’t have a problem, but they have to let us know.”

Content is one thing to talk about with kids, but there are three other “C’s” of online safety to be aware of and teach your kids about, according to Australian parenting website Raising Children :

  • Contact risks: These risks include children coming into contact with people they don’t know or with adults impersonating children online. For example, a child can be persuaded to share personal information with strangers, provide contact details after clicking on pop-up messages, or meet in person someone they have met online.
  • Behavioral Risks: These risks include the actions of children who may harm others, or become a victim of such behavior. For example, a child may destroy a game created by a friend or sibling. Another behavioral risk is accidental in-app purchases.
  • Contract Risks: These risks include children signing unfair contracts, terms they don’t know or understand. For example, children can click a button that allows the company to send them inappropriate marketing messages or collect their personal or family information. Or children may be using a toy, app, or device with poor internet security, making them vulnerable to identity theft or fraud.

It is very important to set rules and standards for what children can do online from the moment they start using the Internet (not just after something negative happens), and you can achieve this by putting together a family media plan . Repeatedly stress the importance of keeping personal information, such as their full name and place of residence, a secret from people they have never met “in real life.”

Hytner also suggests that at this age (and in adolescence) parents should set the expectation that there will be a waiting period for any new app or game your child requests to download – this gives you time to explore it and decide if it’s necessary. suitable for them.

“If you don’t already know [the app] well, they will never get an automatic green light,” she says. “It’s a good habit for them to also look forward to a kind of training period with new things, where they may be using them in a more limited or limited way. And then they can get more carte blanche later when you feel more confident that they are using it appropriately and that you understand what the possibilities are.”

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Teaching Teens Online Safety

By the time your child is between the ages of 9 and 12, you will hopefully have been discussing these four Cs (Content, Contact, Behavior, and Contract) for years, and you will continue to build on them. conversations, especially in anticipation of buying your first smartphone. At this age, they often have their own devices and use the Internet much more independently, so these continuous conversations become more important as they are more likely to stumble upon sexually explicit material, violence, or otherwise harmful. Raising Children recommends that you talk to your children about ways to limit the content they can see, such as using safe browser search settings.

Around fifth or sixth grade, Heitner says, many kids start wanting to text friends and family, whether on their own phone or through a shared family device like an iPad. It is also important here to discuss the potential scenarios they may face and how they can deal with them. To get them to be more critical of text messages, she suggests asking them questions like:

  • What would you do if you were in a group text message and someone said they wanted to restart the group text message without you?
  • What will you do if someone says something bad about a teacher or another friend?
  • What would you say to a friend who texts you too much and needs a break?

Hytner also strongly recommends that teens start texting before they start joining any social media apps.

“Ideally, kids have six months or a year to just message at least social media — and maybe even more time if they’re texting at an earlier age — because text messaging is the whole world. problems,” she says. “I really want kids to get comfortable there before they move to Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok or any other more public account.”

And again, it’s important to set ground rules for usage before they get their first phone, not after you suddenly notice they’re using it in the middle of the night because you haven’t set up a “no devices in your room before bed” rule. “. rule.

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Teaching Teens Online Safety

By adolescence, most children deal with a huge amount of communication with their friends on the Internet. And, as Hytner points out, we are not intermediaries in this communication, as our own parents were when our friends called at home. Thus, our parents had a better understanding of who we were talking to on a regular basis than we were with our children.

“So we want to ask them who they are talking to and how things are going,” she says. “We also want to ask if they feel confident standing up for boundaries if someone asks for a nude photo of them – do they feel confident saying no? Or, if someone sends them an unsolicited nude photo, do they understand that this is a problem to be reported and not just something that is annoying?

Hytner says that when she thinks about online safety for kids this age, she thinks mostly about emotional and mental health security. “Many kids use location sharing [with their friends] and they may want to turn it off,” she says. “They certainly need to be honest with themselves about how they feel; seeing your friends doing things without you can evoke a lot of feelings and it can be useless. I think it’s important to just help kids self-reflect and self-regulate what they experience with specific applications and with specific people.”

Talking to teens about how the app’s algorithm feeds them new content is just as important as discussing what sources they use to get information they trust.

“For example, if you’re looking at fitness content, there might be diet content next to it, and diet content is toxic; it’s not safe for kids, so we can say, “Maybe don’t put your fitness programs here,” Heitner says. “Also, Reddit and Quora are filled with misinformation; we want to help kids embrace the natural skepticism of adolescence, and do it in a way that engages them in media literacy and in a way that doesn’t make them feel like cheaters.”

And, of course, we need to talk to our teens about how they interact with strangers, especially if they spend a lot of time in places like Discord.

“We need to dive a little deeper into this with our kids to make sure they aren’t in active interaction with adults they don’t know, or even peers they don’t know that can be harmful,” Heitner says. “[Discord] is a place where kids meet strangers and sometimes create a community, and that can be cool, but we want to be careful about that. I don’t mind if teenagers, for whatever reason, interact online with people they don’t know. I don’t think strangers are always “dangerous,” but I do think strangers should be approached differently than those you meet in person at school or at an event.”

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