Protecting Our Kids By Parenting Our Kids Online

A guest blog post by Emily Cherkin, The Screentime Consultant

The number one job of parents has always been to Keep Our Kids Safe (hello: baby proofing, bike helmets, and seatbelts.) This also includes decisions about when to provide our children with smartphones and Internet access. However, the current global pandemic has added a whole new layer of parental anxiety about children’s health and well-being, and it isn’t just our fears about our children contracting or spreading the virus.

The more time online, the higher the risk of sexual exploitation

As our children spend more time online, they are more at risk for online sexual exploitation. Unfortunately, recent reports from Canada’s National Child Exploitation Crime Centre, the European Union’s Europol, and the U.S. Center for Missing and Exploited Children have all documented significant increases in reports of online exploitation, child pornography, and grooming.

The NCMEC reports the number of cases reported topped 4 million in April of 2020 (up from 1 million in April of 2019). Though there may be multiple reasons for this uptick, the obvious one is that more children at home on screens means more opportunities for predators to find children. Perhaps the “good” news here is adults are also home more now and more likely to see and therefore report online abuses.

So how can parents keep their kids safe online, especially as so many children head into remote learning this fall?

Here are five strategies to help keep kids safer online.

Assume “when,” not “if.”

If your child has a smartphone or connects to the Internet, the question is not what to do if they see porn, it is what do we do when they see it. If the thought of this sends you into violent convulsions, then they should not have Internet access. Period.

• • If you can shake the shudders, your best bet for protecting your child is not to pretend that porn isn’t out there or to assume that your child won’t find it (whether they seek it out or not: porn is everywhere and they are just as likely to stumble into it accidentally as they are to seek it out.)
  • Your job is to know that this is a reality and to prepare yourself to have these conversations– before you hand over the device.

Be Proactive: Have Constant Conversations.

Prevention is the name of the game here. Just like those Birds and Bees talks, we have to have Internet safety and abuse prevention conversations continuously.

• • This can range from media literacy lessons about gender roles and stereotypes to reading and discussing news stories about the Me Too Movement. Your children will learn about sex from somewhere, and their developmental needs and interests and questions will vary as they grow.
  • Parents must be prepared to have frequent, short, and factual conversations with children about sexual health, consent, and safety. And these conversations have to begin before kids enter school.
  • Otherwise, the information they get from their peers (or teachers) might be different from the information you want them to have. Get ahead of that and start the conversations young.

Speaking of Consent: Do you ask permission to take your child’s photo?

This is something I have thought about a lot. When we snap our child’s photos and post them to our social media accounts, we aren’t really thinking about teaching consent. Yet there is a direct through line here.

• • It is silly to think that our six-month old can grant permission to have her photo taken, yet the work of Magda Gerber teaches us that we should always treat babies and children with respect, which includes asking their consent about how we touch or move them, even if they verbally cannot give it yet. Why? Because we are modeling the behavior we want our children to expect as they get older.
  • Eventually they will realize that we’re taking their picture and at some point, they will get mad or ask us to stop. If we’ve modeled asking their permission (and, more importantly, honoring the “no” if they say it!), then when they are tweens or teens with social media accounts, they know that permission is required to take or post a photo.
  • I taught middle school for 12 years. Social and peer pressure is not a new phenomenon; social media just ups the ante. Keeping your kids safe online means helping them be advocates for themselves and expecting that images that others may take of them must be taken only when consent is given.

To whom do you want your child to go to when something online makes them uncomfortable?

I doubt any parent would answer this question with: “Back to the Internet.” No. Of course not. We want our children to come to us, or to another trusted adult, anytime they see or experience ANYTHING that makes them uncomfortable (that goes for offline interactions, too).

• • Talking to your children about porn or predation doesn’t make them more likely to look at porn or be preyed upon; on the contrary, children who are taught what dangers to look for, to trust their gut, and to report any concerns to a trusted adult are FAR less likely to be exploited.
  • If you are not ready to have these conversations, your child isn’t ready to be on the Internet. This also means that when our children DO come to us to report something, we absolutely 100% have to respond with: “I’m sorry that happened. Thank you for telling me. This is an adult problem to take care of and I am going to figure out what to do next.”
  • Parents, you do not need to have the solution right in the moment, but you do need to validate and acknowledge your child’s fears without shame or blame. The goal here is that they come to you no matter what, because they trust that you will not respond in anger, punish them, or somehow make them feel responsible for what happened. If you do, guess where they will go next time something like this happens? Probably back to the Internet.

Parental Controls only do so much

Parents also ask me all the time what parental controls I recommend. My response is that I don’t recommend parental controls, I recommend parenting.

• • Here’s the thing: parental controls do not exempt us from parenting. If you find that you don’t mind managing the increased efforts and screen use (for you) that goes along with setting up and managing a parental control account, then go for it. There are some apps and sites that can catch things in a filter and presumably keep out the bad stuff.
  • But nothing is fool-proof, sometimes good stuff is blocked, things on the Internet change rapidly, kids are super savvy about work-arounds, AND just having parental controls doesn’t mean that children know what to do when something DOES slip through.
  • As Devorah Heitner, author of Screenwise, states, “Monitoring cannot substitute for mentoring.” Parents, it is still our job to teach our children about healthy online behaviors and what to do when something feels off.

There is no question that parenting in the digital age is fraught with dangers we didn’t deal with during our childhoods, and the global pandemic has shifted the balance of on-screen vs. off-screen time significantly. But the fact remains that just like kids will be kids, parents must be parents. This period in our lives does not have to be disastrous; it can be instead an opportunity for families to work together, have tough but important conversations, and forge a better and safer path forward.

Emily Cherkin is a mother of two (9 and 12), a former middle school teacher, a nationally recognized speaker and writer, and the founder and owner of The Screentime Consultant.