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This post is part of our “Big Talks” series—a guide to helping parents navigate the most important conversations they’ll have with their kids. Read more here.
It is one of the most universal of parenting fears, a necessary evil we cannot shield our kids from for long because we know they will have to live and work in this world as adults. I am talking, of course, about the internet. From the time they’re toddling around and trying to pry our own phones out of our hands, to their teenage days, when much of their social life happens online, we’ve got precious few years to teach our kids how to navigate the online world as safely as possible.
For help on how to do that, I spoke with Devorah Heitner, author of Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World and the upcoming book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. I’ll also provide some additional resources for each age group along the way.
Teaching preschoolers about online safety
Even before they’re old enough to be texting with friends, posting on social media, or gaming on servers with strangers around the world, it’s important to start modeling healthy tech use. The first thing to recognize with preschoolers, Heitner says, is that we are using technology in front of them all the time. They know we’re taking pictures and videos of them on our phones, they see us scrolling endlessly while they’re splashing in the bathtub, and they may even bring our phones to us when we leave them in another room because they know how important that device is.
“It’s really important, at that age especially, to recognize how much we’re modeling our own digital behaviors and connections,” she says.
And we should think about what we’re not modeling, too. Parents in their 30s or older likely grew up with a family landline phone that everyone used and communicated through in a much more public way than we do today. Without even realizing it, our parents were modeling to us some basic phone and communication norms and manners.
“We got a lot of communication practice by osmosis, and kids aren’t getting that now,” Heitner says. Because of that, she recommends parents start to teach those manners at a young age, starting with talking about how we say “hello” at the beginning of a call and “goodbye” when it’s time to go (and don’t wander off mid-way through). We can start to teach them why we can’t call someone when it’s too late or too early, or when we might want to call versus texting or Facetiming someone, and ages 4 or 5 is not too young to start to impart those lessons, Heitner says.
Modeling healthy tech-use habits and communication skills early on—before they have smart devices of their own—will provide a good foundation for when they do start to navigate apps, games, and chats in later years.
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Teaching kids ages 5-8 about online safety
The early elementary years are often when kids begin to have a bit more freedom to watch videos, play games, and communicate with friends and family members. One of the first things to stress to kids this age, Heitner says, is that if they come across anything online that is upsetting or scary, they should come to you about it—and, most importantly, reassure them they won’t be in trouble for doing so.
“We really don’t want to scare kids away from reporting,” she says. “So we have to make sure we’re being very clear that they’re not in trouble, but they need to let us know.”
Content is one thing to talk to kids about, but there are three other “C’s” of online safety to be aware of and to 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 posing as children online. For example, a child might be persuaded to share personal information with strangers, provide contact details after clicking on pop-up messages, or meet in person with someone they’ve met online.
- Conduct risks: These risks include children acting in ways that might hurt others, or being the victim of this kind of behavior. For example, a child might destroy a game that a friend or sibling has created. Another conduct risk is accidentally making in-app purchases.
- Contract risks: These risks include children signing up to unfair contracts, terms or conditions that they aren’t aware of or don’t understand. For example, children might click a button that allows a business to send them inappropriate marketing messages or collect their personal or family data. Or children might use a toy, app or device with weak internet security, which leaves them open to identity theft or fraud.
It’s key to set rules and standards for what kids can do online from the moment they start navigating the internet (not only after something negative happens)—and you can get that rolling by creating a family media plan together. Repeatedly stress the importance of keeping private information, like their full name and where they live, private from people they’ve never met “in real life.”
Heitner also suggests at this age (and into the tween years ahead) that parents set an expectation that there will be a waiting period for any new app or game your child requests to download—that’s to give you time to research it and decide whether it’s appropriate for them.
“Unless you already know [the app] really well, they’re never gonna get an automatic green light,” she says. “That’s a good habit to build in so that they’re also expecting to have a kind of a training-wheels period with new things, where maybe they’re using it in a more restricted or limited way. And then they might get to have more carte blanche later on when you feel more confident that they’re using it in ways that are appropriate, and that you understand what the possibilities are.”
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Teaching tweens about online safety
By the time your kid is in the 9- to 12-year-old age range, you’ve hopefully had many years of discussing those four C’s (content, contact, conduct, and contract), and you’ll keep building upon those conversations, particularly in the lead-up to the purchase of their first smartphone. At this age, they often have their own devices and use the internet much more independently, so these continued conversations become increasingly important as they become more likely to come across material that is sexually explicit, violent, or otherwise harmful. Raising Children recommends talking to your kids about ways to restrict the content they can see, such as using safe search settings on a browser.
Around fifth or sixth grade is when Heitner says a lot of kids start wanting to text with friends and family, whether on their own phone or through a shared family device like an iPad. It’s important here, too, to talk through potential scenarios they may encounter, and how they might handle them. To get them thinking more critically about texting, she suggests asking them things like:
- What would you do if you’re on a group text and someone says they want to restart the group text without you?
- What will you do if someone says something mean about a teacher or another friend?
- What could you say to a friend who is texting you too much, and you need a break?
Heitner also strongly recommends that tweens start texting before they start joining any social media apps.
“Ideally, kids have six months or a year on just texting at minimum before social media—and maybe even more time if they’re texting at a younger age—because texting is its own world of challenges,” she says. “I really want kids to get comfortable there before they go to Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, or basically any account that’s more public.”
And again, it’s important to put ground rules for use in place before they get that first phone, not after you suddenly catch them using it in the middle of the night because you haven’t established a “no devices in your room at bedtime” rule.
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Teaching teens about online safety
By the teenage years, most kids are handling a tremendous amount of communication with their friends online. And, as Heitner points out, we’re not the middleman to that communication the way our own parents were when our friends called the house phone. In that way, our parents had a better sense of who we were talking to on a regular basis than we do with our kids.
“So we want to be checking in with them about who they’re communicating with, and how it’s going,” she says. “We also want to ask whether they feel confident asserting a boundary if someone asks them for a nude picture—do they feel confident to say no? Or if someone sends them an unbidden nude picture, do they understand that that’s a reportable problem, not just something that’s annoying?”
Heitner says when she thinks about online safety for kids this age, she’s thinking mostly about emotional safety and mental health safety. “A lot of kids are using location-sharing [with their friends], and they may want to turn that off,” she says. “They should certainly be honest with themselves about how it feels; it can trigger a lot of feelings to see that your friends are doing things without you, and it may not be helpful. I think just helping kids self-reflect and self-regulate around what they are experiencing with specific apps and with specific people is important.”
Talking to teenagers about the way an app’s algorithm serves up new content to them is important, too, as is discussing what sources they are using to get information they trust.
“For example, if you’re looking at fitness content, adjacent to that may be diet content, and diet content is toxic; it’s not safe for kids, so we might say, ‘maybe don’t get your fitness routines here,’” Heitner says. “Also, Reddit and Quora are filled with misinformation; we want to help kids embrace the natural skepticism of adolescence, and doing that in a way that turns them on to media literacy, and in a way that doesn’t make them feel like dupes.”
And of course, we need to talk to our teenagers about the types of communication they’re having with people they don’t know, particularly if they’re spending a lot of time in places like Discord.
“We should dive a little deeper into it with our kids to make sure that they’re not in heavy communication with adults they don’t know, or even peers they don’t know who may be harmful,” Heitner says. “[Discord] is a place where kids are meeting strangers and sometimes building community and that can be cool, but we want to be somewhat cautious about that. I’m not opposed to teenagers connecting with people they don’t know online for any reason. I don’t think strangers are always ‘danger,’ but I do think strangers need to be approached in a different way than somebody you’ve met in person at school or at an activity.”
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