Online Safety for Youth

A child with a smartphone has access to the full spectrum of internet content – the good, the bad, and the ugly. The harms they encounter “are not theoretical,” says Marc Berkman, JD, CEO of Organization for Social Media Safety. “They are, by the clear evidence, severe, and they are pervasive.” Berkman cites recent research that has found:

• • 43% of young adults had seen self-harm content on Instagram. 
  • 32.5% indicated that they had performed the same or similar self-harming behavior as a consequence of seeing self-harm content. 
  • 20% of teens have sent or received a nude or semi-nude photo or video of themselves. 
  • 25% of young people see illicit drugs advertised for sale on social media. 
  • 5% of middle and high school students reported they had been the victim of sextortion.
  • 323% increase in online enticement of children between 2021 and 2023 reported by National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
  • 12,600 sextortion victims reported by the FBI from October 2021 to March 2023,  at least 20 of whom died by suicide.

All children are at potential risk of online harm or exposure to bad actors, not just children who historically have made risky choices or have less impulse control. Expecting adult-level decision-making from even the most well-behaved children is dangerous, cautions Titania Jordan, Chief Parent Officer at parental monitoring software platform Bark Technologies. Jordan has seen too many families who didn’t think their children were at risk.  “Please don’t think ‘not my kid’ or ‘my kid would never.’ Good kids make bad choices. The frontal lobe of their brains that’s responsible for emotional regulation and impulse control and decision-making, it’s not fully formed until they’re in their early to mid 20s. They’re not capable of making the adult decisions that we expect.”

There are many different factors at play that affect any given individual child’s safety, says Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science and Director of  Digital Futures for Children Centre. These factors should impact families’ decision-making around allowing unrestricted use of the internet, including:

• • Children’s need to explore peer influences
  • Specific harmful content experienced online
  • Individual cognitive development and readiness for unrestricted device use
  • Non-screen-related factors such as family conflict, friend issues, academic worries, mental health struggles, financial anxieties

Given these factors, “it’s very hard for anyone to say ‘this is what is right for your child’,” says Livingstone, as these factors vary between different children. Parents are the ones in the position to be evaluating these factors for their own child safety and readiness for exposure.

“There’s not one clear black and white roadmap,” says Berkman, noting that experts are investigating many different ways for parents to improve internet safety for their children.

Children often react defensively to “top down” cautions or corrections to online (or any) behavior.  Experts agree that creating an environment where they feel connected to you as a parent and safe in disclosing experiences and content they see online is critical to equipping them with the skills they need to stay safe.  Normalizing open and regular conversation about online activity, even when things are going well, makes it much easier for parents to have the harder discussions later, says Sherri Hope Culver, Director of the Center for Media and Information Literacy and professor at Temple University. “Have it be just ‘this is part of what we talk about in our family,” she suggests, and kids will get used to answering questions such as “Hey, did you see anything online that surprised you or was a little scary?”

“Having that open relationship parent-to-child, so that they feel safe and able to discuss concerning content that they see on social media, is absolutely critical,” says Berkman. Jordan agrees –  “No tool will replace a solid relationship with your child, which is where the conversations come into place.  Nothing can replace open and honest conversations with your kids, much earlier than you might think,” she says.

Allow your older child opportunities to lead these discussions to create an environment of trust. “If you want teens to listen to you, connect with them before you correct them. Engage in what they like, and then have them lead the discussion,” says internet safety expert Fareedah Shaheed.

Instead of jumping straight from “no smartphone” to an “all access” smartphone for children, Jordan strongly suggests an interim step with phones enabled with parental monitoring and child safety features. “When it comes time to give your child a smartphone, opt for anything but an iPhone. There is the Bark phone, but there’s also Troomi, Gabb, there’s Pinwheel, there are flip phones, there’s the Light Phone; Google ‘safer smartphones for children’ and see what’s available in your area.”

Unfortunately, harmful situations regularly occur for children even before they own their own personal media device, says Jordan. “The amount of children that watch bullying take place through group text chats is happening at younger and younger ages and stages, even before kids might have their own smartphone. It’s happening on family-issued devices like an iPad, where kids have an iCloud account and boom, they’re entered into this muck,” she says.

Just because every other kid in the class may have a smartphone at a time earlier than your family planned isn’t a reason to fall into line and abandon your own sense of what your own child is ready for, says Livingstone. “Just stick to what your values are and what you think is important about your family. All families are different.”  

“It’s okay for your kid to be left out,” says Jordan. “My son was very, very convincing with his arguments for why he needed a smartphone when he got one, or access to social media before he was ready,” she says.  Parents might worry that their child’s social relationships will suffer if they don’t join in, but Jordan shares her own experience of allowing this to happen. “What I didn’t realize at the time is that by allowing him to be included, it actually just allowed him to be included in bullying and exposure to problematic content and themes that negatively impacted his mental and physical health – even more so than just not giving him that access,” she says. Socially, she regretted not just prioritizing playdates or other opportunities to grow without the smartphone. “Please delay access for as long as possible, but do it with a kind heart and compassion and communicate clearly the why behind it:  ‘Here’s why I’m delaying. I don’t want you to be left out, but I do want you to be left out of this, this, this and this problem that your heart and your mind is just not ready for,’” she suggests.

At younger ages it’s appropriate to monitor and restrict access to the open internet. At some point, the time comes to allow a child or adolescent the autonomy to wade into unrestricted waters. When is the right time for this? Trust your gut, says Shaheed. While the general approach of graduated responsibility is broadly agreed-upon by experts, finding that “moment” to switch will depend on your individual child, family, and gut feel for the right time.

Telling your children about your own experiences of vulnerability or the hard life lessons you learned can help humanize you as a concerned parent and also create a safer space for your child to share their own experiences.  “Speak to them as if you’re the ‘experienced friend,’” says Shaheed. “Share those vulnerable moments from your life – a bully in school, a situation that made you feel uncomfortable when you went out with your friends, a moment where you disagreed with your parents, a moment where you got upset with a decision your parents made as a kid,” she suggests. In this way you can model and normalize sharing about risky situations as they develop.

Some parents hold back from discussing their children’s online life because they feel ill-equipped to understand the rapidly changing digital landscape. Shaheed urges adults to get over that feeling of insecurity. “You don’t have to understand gaming or social media or tech to give them life lessons that you have learned, without any expectation of them sharing their own lessons,” she says.

Creating time and space to join in on a child’s favorite online activity can foster connection and help you gauge what kind of experiences they are having. “Join your child in their favorite games or ask them to show you how they play it. You can spend quality time watching TikTok, YouTube, or Twitch videos,” suggests Shaheed.

“You need to have conversations around sexting,” says Jordan, who notes experienced educators referring to sexting as “the new first base.”  Just because it’s common does not mean it’s appropriate for children, and they need to know about safeguards for sexting experiences that go wrong, she says.  In addition to familiarizing yourself with local laws where you live, be aware that in the US, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a service called Take It Down that can help children get “nudes” taken down offline if necessary.

“Media literacy” is a phrase used to describe the ability to critically think about media. Developing these skills are essential for online safety, say experts. Culver suggests teaching media literacy by skipping formal “here’s how to have media literacy” lectures and more informally getting children to ask questions of the content they consume, such as:

• • Who created the content/message?
  • What is the purpose?
  • What are the creative techniques being used?
  • Who’s the audience for this content?
  • How does it make me feel? Which parts make you feel good or not so good?

These conversations can and should start as soon as children start using digital media early in life, says Culver. “The most important thing about media literacy and the online safety space is to talk early and often. This is something that needs to happen from the very minute that you’re handing a child a tablet. When they are toddlers, you can talk to your children about basic media use decisions. Conversations can help your children understand, ‘Now we’re going to use media, now we’re going to put it away. Now we look at it, now we don’t.’” 

When children become older, they can use these ingrained skills and questions to help develop a feeling of agency about making choices of media use, noticing how it makes them feel, and taking appropriate action from that, says Culver.

Make it common to talk about the “why” of online behavior with children, suggests Culver. Not just why they can’t go to a site, but also why they might want to, or why a site may have restrictions, she says. Establishing the family position on why or when something might be inappropriate or okay, long before a hard decision has to be made, will help train the child early to understand your approach and also to consider for themselves what might be healthy for them.

Research on heavily restrictive parental monitoring is “pretty ambivalent” says Livingstone. “It might keep kids safer, but it stops them gaining the media literacy that we want them to have. It stops them from developing confidence. And sometimes it destroys the relationship or undermines the relationship between parent and child.”  With all these in mind, Livingstone suggests focusing instead on mentoring, enabling, scaffolding, and supporting with a long range view.  With that approach in place, monitor and restrict only the essentials to keep children safe.

The goal is not necessarily to get them off a certain site or the internet entirely, says Culver. “The goal is to use it more wisely and in a way that works for them.”

Helping kids to develop their own awareness of how certain uses of media are making them feel has been the most impactful aspect of her work with youth, says Culver, and yet it is the question that adults least often bring up with them. “If we ask them how it makes them feel, and it doesn’t make them feel good, then you have a place to go to talk about ‘What parts of it are making you feel better?’, ‘What parts of it are not making you feel as good? How do we navigate that? How do we change what we’re doing so you actually feel better about it?’”

For specific training and support for parents as well as youth for online safety, our panel of experts suggested a few trusted sources:

• • NetSmartz from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (available in English and Spanish)
  • Be Internet Awesome from Google
  • Safe Online Surfing challenge from the Federal Bureau of Investigation
  • Shaheed’s free resource library on specific online safety topics

Helping children discern the difference between “filtered life” and unfiltered “real life” can help them understand how social media presentations may affect self-confidence and self-esteem, which in turn can impact vulnerability to online harms, says Jordan. “You need to talk to them about filtered life… and how these filters can hurt our self-confidence and sense of self-worth if we perceive that we need to look or be a certain way to garner likes, comments, or follows. That’s not where we should be getting our self-worth and our self-confidence from. Please encourage your children, if and when they do have access to social media, that happiness is an ‘unfollow’ away’,” she says.

For some children, parental controls work well, and active monitoring is essential for many families, and many experts suggest Bark as a good example of helpful technologies for parental controls. However, not all parental controls work equally well, or with different children. “We did a review recently of whether the research shows the benefits of using parental controls, and it was a mess,” says Livingstone. “Some parental controls are helpful and kids are safer. Some had no effect whatsoever. Some make things worse because they create tension between the child and the parent.” A lack of regulation or standards for efficacy mean it’s very difficult for parents to know which parental controls are going to help with online safety.

In addition, some third-party parental monitoring technologies may have inadequate safety and security controls built in, which can put child data privacy at risk, notes Shaheed. “Third-party technologies often don’t have the team, resources, money or care to have extra security. There have been apps already that have leaked thousands and millions of kids’ data, information, messages because they did not have security. When you’re going with third-party software, make sure they actually care about security,” she says.

A preoccupation with control or safety measures can lead kids to feel like parents are becoming obsessive, says Jordan. “Please use time limits, filters, location tracking within reason – please don’t be a stalker. If you want to get alerted to issues with your children’s context, and content, you can look at Bark.”

“Never install [parental monitoring software] without your kids knowing, unless it’s an extreme circumstance – it’s going to backfire against you,” states Shaheed. A lack of trust from a child feeling overmonitored may be the difference between them telling you about an unsafe situation or hiding it from you when they need you most.

“The fact is, if you install it without talking with your child first, you’re simply aiming for that ‘gotcha’ moment, catching them behaving incorrectly” says Culver. “The goal is for the child to consider their actions in advance, before problems begin.”  Having the difficult conversation ahead of time before installing [parental controls] opens the door for more open and honest conversation as situations develop.

Parents should be aware that their own personal behavior with their devices is the greatest predictor of how their own children will interact with media, notes Culver. Take advantage of this and give a running commentary about intentional media behavior, such as putting away phones at appropriate times. “Actually explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it – as you are doing it,” she suggests. 

Jordan notes that children learn most from what you actually do as a parent versus what you say should be done. “Modeling appropriate tech behavior, like not keeping a phone in front of your face all the time when you’re around your kid, and turning off notifications, and maybe not charging it beside your bed at night,” can show your children that it’s not just talk.

How can you know if something that warrants parental attention or intervention is happening in the realm of an adolescent’s private internet use? Jordan urges parents to pay attention to signs that your child isn’t thriving:

• • How’s their appetite? 
  • How’s their sleep? 
  • How are their grades? 
  • How is their demeanor? 
  • Are they more or less interested in things that they used to be interested in or not? 
  • Is there any indication in your child that something has changed with them, that they’re not thriving and your gut tells you something’s “off?” Trust your parental instinct.

Unsafe online behavior by children does not exist in a vacuum, and is often informed by other stressors or anxieties that affect their well-being and may make them more susceptible to a dangerous online situation, says Livingstone. “Online may not be where [unsafe] things start. It could be with friends, it could be with what’s happening at school. It could be worries about grades. It could be worries about you as parents, or how things are going at home as well. Often we see that it’s because of those problems that children go and look at something online that might be depressing, or look for help, or they go and want that extra bit of support, that may make them a bit more vulnerable.”

If something happens to your child that poses a threat or danger to their physical or mental health, it can be very difficult to maintain composure as a parent. However, being able to do so could make the difference between your child trusting you and accepting your help or falling further into a grooming relationship or other dangerous situation.  “You’ve got to freak out quietly inside, but convey a calm, safe space demeanor to them on the outside so they know they can come to you with anything. Because it’s really not a matter of if, but when they encounter some of the most problematic content in people online,” says Jordan. 

Shaheed shares a personal story of how she almost left home as a teen to meet with an online predator who had groomed her in an online video game, but her mother’s measured response provided a potentially life-saving intervention. “She remained cool, calm and collected–so what I call the ‘Three C’s.’ She connected with me as a human being. She made me feel whole, normal, and loved. She did not judge me, she felt like she was my friend. She took on the role of what we call the experienced friend instead of the controlling manager… She knew that any emotional push she gave me would have landed me into a stranger’s arms, where I felt more loved, accepted, and safe by them than I did my own mother. And nothing is more dangerous than that when you’re trying to protect your kids from online predators, especially when we’re talking about social media and online games.”

If you do have an emotional or “freak out” reaction to a difficult situation with your child, it’s normal, but try to recognize it as soon as possible and apologize sincerely to your child, suggests Shaheed. “When you apologize, it actually builds a stronger relationship. If you can let them know why you’re sorry, you can say, ‘I’m sorry for [insert your reaction]. I love you so much that sometimes I get scared and I react quickly. I’m working on it, I promise. I’m not mad at you. Please continue. I’m so glad we’re having this conversation.’”

While there is much that can be done at home and within the family to safeguard children’s online safety, it’s not, and shouldn’t be, parents’ singular responsibility to keep kids safe online, says Livingstone. “Many, many different actors are responsible, and governments are beginning to regulate companies and companies are beginning to respond, and we need to think where we want that direction to go,” she says.

While regulators and businesses have implemented some child safety measures, much more remains to be done. “The hard question is working out what is not being done yet,” says Livingstone. “How come we still have children encountering cyber crime of different kinds? How come the algorithms are still able to pinpoint some vulnerable children and send them negative and hostile content? How come the simplest thing that children always want—when something goes wrong, they want to be able to report to the platform and have it taken down – that still doesn’t happen?” Advocating for more regulation as well as transparency and accountability from online platforms is necessary to make these changes.