Staying safe online: resources for parents

As the weather inevitably results in us spending more time indoors, it’s likely we’ll all be online for increased amounts of time.

As your children reach the stage of self-guided online access it’s important to be aware of ways you can monitor their activity and manage it without literally looking over their shoulder. Even if your children have been online for some time it’s always a good idea to refresh your awareness of potential perils, and also stay up to date on any new issues.

We’re not online safety experts ourselves but we are good at collating information, and that’s what we’ve done for you here. We’ve pulled together some useful websites each of which offer something different.

PixelPrivacy have what they call How To Keep Your Children Safe Online: The Ultimate Guide For The Non Techy Parent which sounds spot on for most of us.

For those of you of a certain age, Childline will be a very familiar organisation. It will come as no surprise to know that they’ve got some great advice on staying safe online. Of course there are similarities to the Safety Net Kids advice but Childline go more in-depth with guidance on, for example, how to keep your device and information safe. 

There’s also guidance on how to spot fake news, a relatively new phenomenon (well, the awareness of it, rather than its existence). For older children, there’s an article on sexting and sending inappropriate images; what it is, what to do if you’ve shared a photo you didn’t want to, and how to report it if necessary. Again, another site worth browsing both as a parent and children, if they’re that bit older and can understand and digest the information themselves.

The BBC’s website (under the CBBC channel) also features in our list of resources, partly as they’ve included a video, a medium which can often appeal to children and young people more than text alone! They’ve also limited their tips to eight, making it digestible for children but also practical and useful.

Finally we’re including Internet Matters, a site dedicated to providing information for parents to keep their children safe online. This is another site that includes useful videos, on a number of topics such as Piracy leading to camera access and online gaming. There’s also copious amounts of guides showing you exactly how to set up the parental controls on social media platforms and devices.

Also worth checking out is the advice by age so you can move your understanding and requirements on depending on how old your child is. This is a much bigger site than, say, Safety Net Kids so it may look a little overwhelming but it does mean that everything is covered and you can do the most comprehensive management and checks needed to keep your children (and you) safe.

We hope you find these resources useful. We’re always happy to receive your suggestions about information or tips that we can share with other Discover & Be families.