Keeping safe online: Rules of engagement with social media, gaming and more

You knew there were risks, so you put an infrastructure around your child to ensure they’d be as safe as possible. So why wouldn’t you do the same for them in the online world?

Earlier this month, Ireland’s online safety charity CyberSafeKids, teamed up with National Parents Council (NCP) to launch its ‘Same Rules Apply’ campaign, highlighting the need to approach parenting our children online as we do offline.

CyberSafeKids CEO Alex Cooney points out that offline we don’t let young children wander off through unknown places on their own, see over 18s movies or invite strangers into their bedrooms.

“Yet when we give children unfettered online access, we’re effectively doing those things we wouldn’t do offline. Remember, giving your child access to the online world unsupervised means you’re also giving the online world unsupervised access to your child.”

Cooney says the pandemic and lockdowns accelerated children’s positive use of technology.

“Technology greatly facilitated children’s lives and their ability to learn, create, socialise and have fun.”

But there was another, darker side, with increases in reports of child sexual abuse material online, and in contacts made to children with the intention to cause harm. All of which makes it more urgent that we now take a serious look at how we can protect our children online.

CyberSafeKids latest survey (September 2022-January 2023) of more than 1,600 eight to 12-year-olds found 30% can “go online whenever they want”, 22% have seen content online they “wouldn’t want their parents to know about” and only 18% said they “weren’t allowed devices in their bedroom”.

Open trusting relationships

Technology is so pervasively woven into the fabric of our lives that parents can feel helpless when faced with keeping children safe online. “The internet as a tool is so unwieldy and unregulatable, we can think ‘what’s the point’,” says child and adolescent psychotherapist Dr Colman Noctor.

Noctor emphasises however that the best mechanism for keeping your child safe online is one you can control – creating an open, trusting relationship with the child. And parents need to invest as much in creating this relationship as they do in any digital ‘safe cross code’.

“The most protective factor is the relationship children have with the ‘good enough’ adult in their lives. It’s about trust, about creating an open approachable relationship where your child can come to you if they’re struggling and say ‘I came across this, I’m not sure about it – what do you think,’” says Noctor.

This trusting, open, communicative approach needs to be a given from when a parent decides to give their child a smart device/phone, says Áine Lynch, NPC CEO.

“We’ve got very used to seeing a phone meaning a smartphone with all the capabilities that it has. We need to sit down before the device is purchased and work out and agree what it’s going to be used for.”

The NPC has a guide for developing such an agreement, but when working out an agreement with your child, Lynch says parents need to set the scene properly.

“Don’t spring the conversation on your child – it puts them in an unequal position. Both child and parent need to be aware this conversation’s going to happen, and both need to be aware of what’s going to be discussed. Just getting this right lets your child know you mean what you say.”

Lynch recommends starting with a positive conversation about your child’s online activity.

“If there’s negativity or stress, it tends to make children hide what they’re doing. Ask what they enjoy doing online, what they don’t particularly like doing, what they do with friends online, anything they haven’t done that they’d like to.”

Exploring deeply what activities your child likes, or would like to do online, hugely helps inform the decision around what kind of device/phone to give and what kind of accessibility they’ll have.

The conversation also needs to explore concerns your child has about being online.

“Adults tend to think of risks like grooming, who the child might meet. But there are day-to-day things causing children difficulty online – hurtful comments, exclusion from WhatsApp groups, not understanding things their friends are doing,” says Lynch, adding that children need to hear it’s a parent’s responsibility to protect their child online.

Balanced ‘diet’ of online time

Noctor says it’s important parents focus on ‘time well spent’ on technology rather than ‘time spent’. He finds a food analogy helpful.

“There’s good food, and not so good. We assess children’s diets by the balance of food eaten, not by how much time it takes them to eat.”

Children, he says, can do really creative things online that aren’t mindless scrolling.

“Or they can do meaningless activities that leave them feeling flat, less well than when they started. We need to educate them to distinguish between what’s a good use of technology and what’s not good.”

Noctor says we need to build technology into children’s lives – lives that are already very busy, between school, homework, extracurricular activity, family time, mealtimes, and bedtime.

“All these have to take priority. The recreational stuff, gaming, YouTube – they can still do that – but we need to place technology where it should be, so we create ability in children to see what’s important and what isn’t.”

Parents need to model this.

“If a parent’s emailing over dinner, they’re sending a double message. There’s only value in your convictions if you follow them through,” says Noctor.

Your child getting a smartphone, he says, is a bit like getting a puppy – the work only starts then.

“It’s laboursome for parents. You have to keep an eye on it, keep checking to see how it’s going. And children need to know a smartphone isn’t a human right. It’s a responsibility – they earn the right by displaying the responsibility.”

Once a child has a device/is active online, Cooney advises focusing on:

• Regular parent-child conversations about what the child’s seeing/doing online.
• Clear ground rules around use and access, for example, keeping devices in family spaces, so parents can more easily be vigilant, rather than in bedrooms with doors shut, which excludes parents from what’s going on.
• Use of parental controls – at device level, app level and/or at network level.
• Keeping an eye on what they’re doing online/who they’re talking to. This could mean picking up the device and checking it – openly and transparently.
• Researching apps/games they want to download so parents are happy they’re appropriate for their child.

Once a child is active online (don’t forget friends’ devices during playdates), we should recognise they’ll likely come across inappropriate content.

“What’s key is to do everything you can to avoid children accessing inappropriate content through the use of filters, and then regularly check in with what they’re seeing and doing online,” says Cooney.

Conversations will need to be had with children on consent, boundaries, distorted representations of reality – and eventually pornography.

“We don’t want them viewing this kind of content without context or some understanding. The other key message is to encourage children to come to a parent/trusted adult if they come across content that upsets/scares them or makes them feel uncomfortable.”

Children are online in large numbers – UNICEF estimates they constitute one-third of global users. Yet the online world was designed by adults for adults. Society needs to redress this imbalance, says Cooney. And the tech industry must play its part so the responsibility doesn’t lie solely on parents’ shoulders.

“Industry has huge responsibility to ensure platforms are built with the safety of their more vulnerable users – children – in mind.”

Recent years have brought some positive changes, for example, the Age Appropriate Design Code in Britain in 2021 that involved additional safeguards for child accounts.

“But we’ve a long way to go before we have ‘safety by design’ as a core design principle,” says Cooney.

Check out these helpful resources:

• www.cybersafekids.ie
• www.commonsensemedia.org
• www.npc.ie
• www.webwise.ie
• See our e-booklet: Digital Parenting - keeping your kids safe online.
• In an ieParenting special event, we ask CyberSafeKids CEO Alex Cooney, National Parents Council CEO Áine Lycnh and Dr Colman Noctor to advise on protecting children when using the internet. Available to watch from Tuesday, February 28.