Teaching Kids Online Safety

With massive lawsuits over the harms of social media in the headlines, many parents are trying to find ways to protect their kids and teach them safe online behaviors while they’re young. Many of us parents grew up in the Wild West of the ’90s internet and had to learn online safety the hard way, which didn’t really give us many tools for helping our own kids. The internet is also a very different place from when we created our first GeoCities page or DeviantArt account.

Teaching kids online safety is especially important because kids face even more challenges online than adults do. It’s important that kids learn to think critically about online information, protect their online privacy, and avoid inappropriate content. While this can be a daunting task, there are tools that can help parents and families navigate our modern online world.

Teach kids digital literacy

Most of us know not to judge a book by its cover, but we don’t always apply this same logic to things written online. The internet is often treated more like a Magic 8 Ball that answers all your questions than a collection of texts written by real human beings. It’s not necessary to teach your kids everything about how the internet works, but they need to know that everything you encounter online was created by someone for a specific purpose. And those purposes are not always good.

Internet literacy is a daunting topic, but the basic idea is to teach kids to ask the same questions about online content that you would about a book:

• Who created the website (or video, image, game, etc.)?
• Why did they create it?
• What does it say?
• How does it say it?
• Should you believe it?

There are also certain issues unique to online content that kids should be able to question. For example, when you’re being fed content by an algorithm on a site like Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok, how is the algorithm deciding what to show you? How does that content differ from what other people might be shown, and how does that shape the way you see the world?

Algorithmic content can do real harm to kids’ self-image, mental state, and social relationships, and it’s engineered to be very difficult to notice. This is all the more reason to teach your kids how to tell if something they see online is an accurate reflection of reality or if it’s distorting the truth in harmful ways.

Teach kids to protect their online privacy

Online privacy rights are under attack from many different angles, and often in the name of protecting children. Breaches of privacy can have very serious consequences, even putting kids in physical danger. It’s important to teach kids not to give out personally identifiable information like their name or address to strangers on the internet, just as they shouldn’t in real life.

Kids should also be made aware of privacy concerns on platforms like social media or online games. While sites like Facebook might seem like a private space they share with their real-life friends, information they post could be sold to advertisers, shared with bullies, or even made searchable on Google. Pictures and posts kids make in high school can surface years later in job interviews or other applications, so they should know what they should post and where it’s okay to post it.

The goal shouldn’t be to make your child afraid of ever going online, but to help them make informed decisions and manage risk. Encourage them to come to you with questions and to develop good online habits. Privacy-conscious behaviors are just as important for adults as they are when you’re a kid.

Help kids understand what’s age-appropriate for them

Protecting kids from inappropriate content is a contentious political issue at the moment, but it’s important for parents to realize that age-appropriate content on the internet involves more than just avoiding violent or sexual content you might find in an R-rated movie. Interactive features like beauty filters, infinite scrolling feeds, and AI chatbots can be disproportionately harmful to younger internet users.

As with all media, what’s appropriate depends on your family, your culture, and your individual kids. While there are many useful guidelines for parents to follow, there is no authoritative standard for what is appropriate for all 12- or 16-year-olds. As parents, you have to decide the rules that will give your children the best online experience and prepare them for making these decisions for themselves once they become independent adults.

There are plenty of tools that parents can use to manage their kids’ online activities. Most platforms like YouTube and Amazon Prime have their own built-in parental controls, as do devices like iPads and PlayStations. You can also set up parental controls across your home network.

Talk to your kids about online safety

The most important thing you can do to teach your kids safe online behaviors is to talk with them about it. Clear communication is always going to be more effective than any software tool in preventing, identifying, or resolving problems they encounter on the internet.

No technological solution will ever match simply working with your kids to build understanding and set boundaries. Every practical digital lock has a workaround, and the challenges kids face are constantly changing. The only way you know what challenges they’re actually facing is for them to tell you themselves.

Additional resources

• Best Parental Controls
• 5 Ways To Stay Safe Online
• What Is a VPN?
• How To Set Up Parental Controls on Your Router
• Best Free Parental Controls