Top Tips for embracing tech and keeping your children safe online
For many parents and grandparents with school age children, keeping children occupied over the 6 weeks Summer Holidays can feel like a daunting prospect. Trying to manage how much screen time they have, is one concern, but more importantly making sure our children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews are safe while they’re online could even save their life.
Unfortunately, many parents and carers believe that because our children are playing upstairs in their bedroom and are on their devices gamily or watching online content that they are safe. This is not always the case. By raising awareness of the potential threats to both carers and children, we can start the conversation around what games our children are playing and more importantly who with, which is a great place to start protecting them better.
Without their daily school routine to keep them busy, children will generally spend more time internet gaming, watching YouTube, or chatting online to their friends, but how do we make sure that they do this safely?
What are the common online threats our children face?
Before we start having the conversation with our children, it's important to be aware of the potential dangers of our children using the internet ourselves and what we can do to protect them.
Common online threats include:
Cyberbullying
Cyber Predators
Posting Private Information
Phishing
Falling for Scams
Accidentally Downloading Malware
Posts that Come Back to Haunt a Child Later in Life
How do we maintain some control over what they watch and who they communicate with?
We completely recognise the benefits that tech brings, long car journeys and waiting around at airports, are all made much easier now that we have access to tablets and devices to keep our children entertained. Our aim is by helping to inform parents and children how to use tech safely, that technology can be embraced – helping everyone to have a much more fun, relaxed and balanced summer holiday period.
There are several things parents can do to keep their children safe online.
There are many advantages to handing over the iPad or letting them spend a couple of hours online gaming, so that we can get a couple of hours focused work time.
As working parents, we completely understand the added pressure childcare brings whilst working from home and sometimes devices can be a useful distraction. What we want to do is share a few pointers to ensure we keep our children safe, by highlighting the potential risks to parents and carers, but also having a conversation with your children about how they can spot harmful behaviour and harmful people.
But there are ways to ensure we monitor their use and make sure that you’re aware who they are gaming with, talking to online.
But there are ways that we can ensure that they do this in a safe way and things we need to discuss with our children, so that they are aware of the risks of the dark web and cyber bullying.
Online Safety Top Tips
1. Start the Conversation
The best way to find out about what your child is doing online, is to check in with them regularly. By taking an interest and asking them what their favourite app or games is, gets the conversation started, open and a regular things that you talk about.
2. Online Safety Family Agreement
Creating an online safety agreement can be used to start a conversation about online safety, agree expectations and boundaries and help to keep your kids safe online.
3. Online Safety Wordsearch
By encouraging children to complete the word search, you can then ask if there were any questions or phrases that they didn't understand or would like to talk about. Complete the online safety wordsearch
4. Host an online games night
Whether it’s Fortnite or FIFA, talking to your child about what they’re doing online is an important tool in helping to keep them safe. Having an activity that you do together can be a good way to get it started.
Get to know the platform
Ask open questions
Master the basics together
Explore privacy and safety settings
Setting up Parental Controls on children's devices
There are hundreds of different devices and models available, but by simply Googling parental controls and the name of your device, you should be able to find some basic instructions on making that device safer and more relevant for your child to use. Here are some of the most popular ones:
Set up Parental Controls on your child’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201304
Parental Controls available for your Samsung Galaxy phone or tablet
Fortnite Setting up Safety and Security - https://www.fortnite.com/safety-and-security
If you're not sure about how to set up any of your devices, please don't hesitate to contact the CJAZ Support Team and we'll be happy to help you with this.