How do you teach children to use the internet safely when most parents would openly admit their kids are more digitally savvy than they are?
The current generation is using the internet from as young as three years old, and a recent Ofcom report revealed that by the age of eight, children spend on average 11.1 hours a week online.
Beyond the home, kids are using the internet at school to watch videos, access their school portals and do research for their homework - but they have yet to learn about the dangers of data security, cyber bullying and social networking.
So where should parents be focusing their attentions and taking the challenge head on? Here are a few areas to consider:
Offline and online behaviour is one and the same.
With new social networking platforms popping up left, right and centre, people are more connected than ever. In many ways it's a brilliant evolution, but, given the sense of anonymity people feel when they're online, it also has a devastating power to attack others while making bullying and abuse harder to detect. We need to make it clear to children that their actions online are equivalent to their actions in the real world, so they shouldn't treat people any differently just because it's digital.
Myth vs reality
Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data - to put that into perspective, 90% of the world's data has been created in the last two years alone. Simply sifting through all this information is challenging enough, without having to weigh up whether or not it can be trusted. This is a difficult subject to broach with a child, so I find the best way is to encourage them to question where the sources have come from, eg photos of a T-Rex marauding through your neighbourhood are extremely unlikely to be real!
You can't hide online
We're all guilty of taking a selfie at some point or another, and kids love to get involved and play around with the filters. While we know to adjust our privacy settings and watch what's in our photos, children don't always understand the consequences of sharing - a silly selfie may contain more information in the background than they realise. So, we need to discuss how quickly content can move across the web and beyond intended audiences.
Start conversations early
Ultimately, the most important thing to remember is to be proactive and start conversations with children early. We couldn't possibly monitor every single activity our kids engage in online - there aren't enough hours in the day! But if we take a little time to use the internet together, and teach by example, we will be well on our way to helping our children be safe and responsible.
Resources
Addressing all of these issues in a child-accessible way is not always simple, but there are resources available that can help and guide families at home in their discussions about good online behaviour and internet safety. We created Search It Up - our animated mini-series about being smart, safe and kind online - just for that reason.
You can check out Search It Up for free on the Azoomee app. Go to www.azoomee.com to find out more
