Safe Zone: Children and Online Safety

00:00:12 – Introductions by Executive Director of Children and Screens Kris Perry

00:01:04 – Moderator Marc Berkman discusses how internet and social media harms are real, severe, and pervasive.

00:05:16 – Sonia Livingstone shares risks to children’s safety online and what steps can be taken to protect children through parenting practices and legislative approaches.

00:17:47 – Follow-up: Have there been positive impacts from current regulations in Europe?

00:19:58 – Sherri Hope Culver discusses using media literacy to ignite critical thinking online.

00:29:40 – Follow-up: What about age-of-entry standards for different types of media or age-verification processes?

00:32:19 – Titania Jordan covers children’s safety on social media, sharing specific tools and strategies parents and youth can use.

00:43:52 – Follow-up: Are there safe phone options available for children?

00:44:45 – Fareedah Shaheed addresses online safety risks in video games and strategies for both children and their parents.

00:53:47 – Follow-up: Are there considerations for using built-in safety technology vs. third-party/subscription-based apps?

00:55:48 – The panel addresses questions from the audience:

00:55:54 – What is one top takeaway for parents looking to improve their child’s safety online?

01:00:11 – How can parents know when to use monitoring vs. mentoring strategies and how to transition from the oversight role to more of a mentoring role as children get older?

01:04:54 – What resources are available for youth specifically to enhance safety?

01:09:09 – What are some red flags that could signify that children are engaging in unsafe experiences online?

01:13:57 – What are some considerations for using monitoring apps if youth don’t want them?

01:24:14 – Wrap-up with Children and Screens’ Executive Director Kris Perry.

[Kris Perry]: Hello, and welcome to today’s Ask the Experts webinar, “Safe Zone: Children and Online Safety”. I am Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. As children spend more time online and the internet becomes increasingly integrated into daily life, their exposure to safety and privacy risks grows. Yet for most families, it’s simply not feasible to monitor every moment of their child’s online activity. So, what can parents, caregivers, and educators do to empower children with the skills and protections they need to navigate the digital world safely? And what essential knowledge do both adults and youth need about popular platforms and the latest technological developments that impact child safety? Today, we’ll be exploring these critical questions with a panel of experts who will provide valuable insights and practical strategies to help you protect children online. In preparation for today’s presentations and discussion, the panel has reviewed the questions submitted during registration and encourages you to submit others through the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. They will respond to as many as possible across the next 90 minutes. We are recording today’s webinar for those who wish to review the material or share with your friends and colleagues. The recording will be posted to our website next week along with any resources mentioned by the panel today. Now, I would like to introduce you to today’s moderator, Marc Berkman. Marc is CEO of the organization for Social Media Safety, the world’s pre-eminent consumer protection organization focused on social media. As a globally recognized expert in social media safety. Marc has testified in front of Congress and has been featured in notable media outlets. Welcome, Marc.

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you so much, and thank you all for joining today. I want to start by thanking Kris and Children and Screens for the privilege of being able to moderate this discussion with these really pre-eminent experts on internet safety, and I want to thank Children and Screens as well for the work that they do on a regular basis, highlighting expertise and research in this field. It is so critical. As Kris mentioned, my name is Marc Berkman, I serve as the CEO of the Organization for Social Media Safety. We’re a national consumer protection organization focused exclusively on social media. That means that through education, advocacy, and technology, we protect against all social media-related harms like cyberbullying, human trafficking, suicide, depression and anxiety, among many others which I’m sure we will be discussing today. So if you are joining today, it means that you must have some level of concern about internet safety. And so, before I turn it over to our panelists here, I want to highlight my own take away point for you, and that is that the harms of the internet, of social media specifically, are not theoretical. They are, by the clear evidence, severe, and they are pervasive. Up to 95% of youth ages 13 to 17 report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use social media almost constantly. Nearly 40% of children ages 8 through 12 use social media. In our own research in partnership with the UCLA School of Education, including over 14,000 teens, a staggering 53% self-reported using social media for more than five hours daily. With this mass adoption of social media, numerous serious social media-related dangers have emerged. Current research shows empirically that social media is harming millions of American children. About 46% of students report experiencing cyberbullying. So you know, cyberbullying victims are about two and a half times more likely to attempt suicide. According to one study, about 43% of young adults had seen self-harm content on Instagram. About 32.5% indicated that they had performed the same or similar self-harming behavior as a consequence. About 20% of teens have sent or received a nude or semi nude photo or video of themselves. According to one study, about 1 in 4 young people see illicit drugs advertised for sale on social media. Approximately 5% of middle and high school students reported they had been the victim of sextortion. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported a 323% increase in online enticement of children. Between 21 and 23, from October 21 to March 23, the FBI reported 12,600 sextortion victims, at least 20 of whom died by suicide. So these studies, among many others, indicate real, ongoing harm from social media. And that’s why discussions on how to better protect our youth like the one we’re having today are so very important. So I want to thank you again for joining, and with no further ado, I want to introduce our first panelist. Sonia Livingstone, OBE, is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is currently leading the Digital Futures for Children’s Center at LSE with the 5Rights Foundation. She founded the EU Kids Online and Global Kids Online Research Networks, has advised a number of European and global organizations, and published 21 books on media audiences, children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment, including Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives. So, please join me in welcoming Sonia Livingstone.

[Dr. Sonia Livingstone]: Thank you so much, Marc, and it’s a pleasure to be here talking with Children and Screens. As you can hear, I’m talking with a British accent, sitting here in London, and my research and my advocacy around children and online safety is done in Britain, in Europe, and also internationally. And I know many folk here are from the USA, I do keep abreast of developments that I think we all do. I’m going to share my screen and offer a short presentation before we get to the discussion. So I hope that is now working well. So, and I’m going to start with really the question of…oh, sorry, yep. As Marc said, my penultimate book was Parenting for Digital Future, and actually my most recent book, just out, is called Digital Media Use in Early Childhood, where we were really thinking about the age group birth to six, not so much social media, but thinking really about children beginning to use devices, going online, a whole host of issues that are beginning to kind of come up there as well. And I do a lot of my work, really, sitting in the kind of scene that you see there on the right of my screen, thinking about how children are using digital devices, digital media in their everyday lives, how parents are kind of making opportunities, but also trying to kind of manage children’s safety. So I’ve talked to a lot of families. My current work is with children, parents, and grandparents, because grandparents also have views and actually everybody has views about how we’re bringing up children in this digital age. I think one of the things I wanted to start with is I fully recognize that the statistics that Marc just read out are really scary, and there are lots of statistics going around and a big discussion about what we need to be doing, how as a society at all different levels from what we do in the home up to what governments do, you know, how should this digital world be properly managed so that children grow up. And our children are in the middle of an experiment because really, we are kind of creating the conditions for them and we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. We really don’t know, and no one has done the 20-year study to see what adults. So that adds to the uncertainty, and that adds to the concerns around the figures on children’s online risk and safety. But I guess one of the things I wanted to start with, and that is always very kind of salient to me when I visit family homes, is that families have lots of other things to worry about too. And so there are good reasons why they do give children digital devices. It’s not just peer pressure, but it’s also the hope that digital devices are going to be the ways for families to learn. It’s often the ways that families have fun together. It seems, as in the title of my book, like a way of preparing children for a digital future so that they have the skills they need, they have the literacies they need, they kind of develop the resilience that they’re going to need. And when I talk to children, they also have lots to say both about the risks and about how they want their parents and schools and governments to protect them, but also about how sometimes digital is the way they can see their friends, the way they can connect with others, the way they get help when they need help, the way they can find things out and be kind of, you know, individual and autonomous and develop their agency. So it’s a really complex picture. Some of you might have seen research that came out from Pew Internet just the other day that asked parents to compare what their teenage years were like with their own teens’. And they said…those who thought it was getting worse—much harder for today’s teens—thought that technology was the reason. But those who thought it was better—their children’s lives are better than their own had been—also thought technology was the reason. So it’s like we’re living through a moment where technology seems the be all and end all. And I did want to, and I am going to focus on the safety issues around, children and screens. But I do want to kind of keep in perspective some of the other things families talk about. Their struggles with well-being in other ways because they’re living with family conflict or mental health issues, their struggles with work or their financial anxieties, or the problems of living through and coming out of a global pandemic. Lots of, you know, lots of issues and sometimes we get so focused on the screen that we don’t quite see the child in the family behind the screen and all the other things that are part of it. So when we ask not what does the screen do to our children but what are the factors that influence well-being, then we have to take into account lots of other things and research, a mountain of research, shows technology is one of the factors, but it’s not the only and it’s not necessarily even the main factor influencing children’s wellbeing. So I’m going to borrow a little work, a research from our UK communications regulator Ofcom, because I really like the way they help us think about a question that parents ask a lot, which is what is the right age? When is my child old enough to do…get on…have a smartphone or get on social media? How do things change with age? And the first thing they did is I think really crucial, which is to say there are a number of different processes, and there are a number of different outcomes that we’re interested in. And somehow we have to think about all of these because if we unpack safety, it includes children’s need to explore their peer influence, the harmful content, their cognitive development. It’s like a whole host of things. And the regulator puts it on a kind of timeline from birth through to adulthood, and tries to kind of map different things happening at different times, and those different things are developmental. They’re about puberty, they’re about social factors like when do children go from the small local school to the big…to the middle school or the big high school? What are the age at which they tend to start using digital devices, social media? It’s a process. And that process, as we know, is different for different children. And it’s different because of all kinds of contextual factors that really matter, and it’s very hard for anyone to say this is what is right for your child. So, you know, parents are in the right position to kind of be taking those decisions and good not to be too influenced by peers oneself. So they take the same timeline for harm and harmful content and try to kind of put some of those statistics that Marc outlined, you know, on the timeline, because they affect children at different ages. And what research often shows is that children encounter more risk as they get older but they’ve also got more skills and more kind of resilience. And they’re also looking for more opportunities. You know, the little kids, they can probably do without too much of this, but as they get older, they’re looking for the opportunities which bring the risks, but bring the skills and resilience. So it’s really hard questions for parents, but you know, we need to keep seeing that broader context. And that matters also for parental supervision. And the role of parents as any parent here knows changes all the time, from perhaps more kind of direct management of what children do through to finding ways for the child to become an adult, for the child to kind of move on and make their own decisions. And again, you know, that kind of handover, if you like, from supervision through to enabling and support and empowerment of children, that’s really hard. But I again, I just want to keep in mind a timeline, a timeline that is different for different children and different families. And I can see that I’m hitting my time limit, so I’m just going to very briefly mention that parents are not on their own. This is a little bit of work we did about how regulators are taking action, and we mapped the coming in of regulation, because it really is coming in now, and how the big companies say they are making changes following the introduction of regulation. And I think some might want to, in this discussion, might want to ask about that regulation. Is it effective? Could it be more effective? I think there’s a lot we need to do here. But I did want to say, you know, it is a kind of, you know, 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. I just wanted to show very briefly how much children have to say, this is from a workshop we did. Children have lots of things they want, not always things that we would think of, but they do want a civilized world, they do want a fun digital world, they don’t want to be hacked, they don’t want their data taken, they don’t want the bullies on there. But they want to have fun, they want to see their friends, they want to kind of, you know, find ways to express and explore. And in my work, I’ve tried to kind of bring together the questions of safety and privacy and opportunity, by thinking about all the things we want, the child rights by design. And I usually offer this to policymakers and to designers, but I think it’s also appropriate for parents to have in mind and to think—are the products my child is using, do they treat children with equity and diversity? Are they age appropriate? Do they think that the product is responsible? Is safety built-in? And so forth. We could probably ask more questions about, but you know, that holistic overview is what I really want to kind of kick off with. And I’ll stop sharing. Thank you so much.

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you so much, professor. I know my team is very appreciative of your work, so thank you for that. I wanted to give you a second to, add a little bit more on that last piece, that last topic of regulation and whether you thought that, and especially for the audience in the US that’s a bit behind Europe here, whether you think regulation…I know we’re in the beginning stages, but whether you’re seeing some positive impact from that and what do you think the next steps are?

[Dr. Sonia Livingstone]: So I absolutely think that the call for regulation, which is like coming from parents, it’s coming from children, it’s coming from teachers, everybody, I think it is beginning to work. So I’m optimistic. Yes, we have some new regulation in Britain. We have an online safety act. We have it in Europe with the Digital Services Act, and both of those say safety by design is vital. Both of them have a kind of mechanism for enforcement and making sure that companies are making the changes, and we see the changes. I know there is a lively debate in the US, sometimes different states and also at the federal level. The hard question, I think, is working out what is not being done yet. You know, how come we still have children literally encountering cyber crime of different kinds? How come, you know, the algorithms are still able to kind of pinpoint some vulnerable children and send them really 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. So I think, you know, we all probably have in our minds a long list of things that need to happen.

I just wanted to say it’s not all down to parents. Regulators and businesses are beginning to do what’s needed.

[Marc Berkman]: Well, thank you so much. The hardest part of this is keeping on time because I think we could go another hour on that alone. So, thank you so much, and we will jump to our next panelist. Please join me in introducing Sherri Hope Culver, who serves as the Director of the Center for Media and Information Literacy at Temple University, where she is a professor of Instruction in Klein College of Media and Communication. She served as vice chair of the UNESCO-led Global Media and Information Literacy Alliance, produces and hosts the podcast Kids Talk Media, and was a Fulbright Global Scholar for 2022, 2023, conducting research on children’s media and media literacy in Brazil, Australia, and the UK. Welcome Sherri.

[Sherri Hope Culver]: Thank you, Marc. It’s always difficult to follow Sonia, that’s for sure, because her research has inspired so many of us. I’m going to share my screen of course, so let me do that. Get that to full screen, hopefully that’s working. So I’m going to talk about media literacy, which is really a passion of mine and one that I feel like it’s so critically important in this conversation. And I have three goals in the short time that we’ve got. Actually I’m going to make sure that I have some time going here so I’ll keep in mind of time. So first is to deepen your understanding of the intersection of media literacy and critical thinking and sort of connect those two things online as well as offline. Thinking about how to support media literacy skill development at home, at school, and out of school, and then some practical actions for incorporating media literacy into screen time and life in general. We’ve already touched on some of the things that I’m involved with and so I’ll go past these because they’ll come up in some of the other points I’m going to make. This is a screen grab from a question that I asked of my college students when I just asked them, “how does media make you feel?” Right? And this was their answer. It was 138 students that responded to this. And just to…we know…I think it’s been very clearly stated, I think, by Sonia, the simultaneous feelings that people have about and kids have about their media consumption, that it’s…it can be scary sometimes and exciting, it can be, narrowing in terms of the things they get to see, but it can also open them up to new worlds. But this idea of how it makes you feel, I think, is actually something we don’t ask kids to think about very often, so that’s one of the things I’ll come back to. Many of the anecdotes that I’ll share with you and the points on may come from the podcast that I’ve been doing for a few years, where I talk to kids about their media use. It’s called Kids Talk Media, I talk to a child and their best friend so it’s two kids together. And it’s not meant to be, it’s not educational for them, right? So if they say to me, “oh, yeah, I’m spending four hours a day playing Call of Duty,” I’m not saying to them, “you know you really shouldn’t do that.” I’m asking them why, how did you find Call of Duty, do your parents know that you’re doing that? So we talk about it so that I can get some more information about it. And so that has really helped me understand the concerns. I think the little Post-It notes that were in the slide that Sonia showed were so great. Those are so many of the things that I hear kids say, that they love being online, they enjoy what they’re doing. But they also seem at a younger and younger age, to be clear that they have to be careful about things as well. They’re not always sure how, but they know that they do need to do that. So kids are obviously, you know, we…I’m just going to go through a couple of quick slides here in terms of where kids are, right. We know that they’re on YouTube and TikTok, they are on Instagram. So all of this information that’s out there about the age that they are supposed to be on versus the age that they are on not only has to do with kids being smart about getting access, but a lot about parents and parents’ considerations of kids being online, right. On Twitch, lots of kid influencers, which are sending very strong messages to kids about…that they should be online. So I’m really intrigued by those messages that happen within children’s media content too, that tell kids in very indirect ways the way they should be interacting with media. So a TV show they might like to see or something that they’re streaming or a game they’re playing, where the characters are on their phones or playing a game or talking about staying up late to be able to watch something, right. It’s not actually the storyline, but it’s the subtle way that people are interacting with each other, which is one of the ways that kids get information about that. And of course, spending so much time on YouTube, more and more of the children that I talk to talk about their relationships with personal digital assistants, Siri and Alexa, and other robots that are happening. And yet, then we get messages from our Surgeon General about social media. So there are so many conflicting messages out there. I’m going to go forward a little bit. So, you know, overall, I could sort of draw an image of just chaos, right? In some ways where we feel like where we like it, we don’t, it’s helpful, it’s not, it’s around us all the time, but we need to stay away. I think that’s the greatest challenge in terms of children in an online space, is that as adults, we think that we are a little better at balancing conflicting messages, but kids are not. And so that puts them in a very difficult place because they do enjoy being online, but they know they have to be more careful about it. I’ve mentioned the term media literacy a few times, right? If you’re unfamiliar with the term or you’re familiar with it and aren’t really sure what it means. So this is the definition that I always come back to, which is the one from the National Association for Media Literacy Education: The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication. So when we think about media literacy, when I think about media literacy, I think primarily about the notion of critical thinking about media. When I talk to parents and educators about media literacy or about media in general, I often lead with the point that I love media. I love to watch television, I like to play video games. Like, I am embracing that, but I want to think about it first. And that ability to dive in but think first, which is of course a really difficult skill for young people, is key to all of this. The five key questions in media literacy are really around authorship, right? Who created the message? What are those creative techniques? What’s the purpose? Who’s the audience? These are questions that you can have a subtle conversation with your children or your classroom, where you’re talking about these issues in a way that is, dare I say, gamified, right? You can have a more informal conversation. We don’t have to say, “let’s talk about the five key questions about media literacy.” But really even thinking about, hey, we’re on this website, who do we think made this website? Just more casually doing that. But this notion of how media makes us feel, I find, is one that over the last couple of years I have found is the one that is most impactful in my conversations with young people, and it’s a question that we least often bring up with them. Because if we ask them how it makes them feel and it doesn’t make them feel good, then you have a place to go about, well let’s talk about what parts of it are making you feel better, what parts of it are not making you feel as good, and how do we navigate that? How do we change what we’re doing? So you actually feel better about it? And of course, this is putting aside for a moment the child who might say to you, it makes me feel great and I like being on it eight hours a day, putting that aside for a minute. But most kids have conflicting feelings about it. You can help them navigate it. So I’ve actually been developing a longer list of questions that is more reflective of the way it makes us feel. Also questions that those initial five don’t touch on where it has to do with who’s actually benefiting from this, where is the money in this, which is even a question that you can have with, once children are starting to handle money themselves, so even at 6 or 7 years old. So bringing it into action, I’m just going to go into that because I know we have really limited time. I think the most important thing about media literacy and media literacy being able to impact the online safety space, is that first red button at the top. Talk early, talk often. That this is not something, the whole conversation we’re having today is not one to have that starts when they’re teenagers. This is something that needs to happen from the very minute that you’re handing a child a tablet and they’re six months old or eight months old, they’re conversations you can have about, now we’re going to use media, now we’re going to put it away. Now we look at it, now we don’t. And when they’re a little bit older, whether we like what we’re watching or we like what we’re playing, or we don’t. How did it make us feel? Maybe we stop. So that they are growing up having an understanding of “I make choices about the media that I use, I think about it, and then I take action related to it.” So we don’t have enough time to go through all of the tips here. I also have a whole list of conversation starters, things that you could do with your kids to prompt that or with your students to prompt that so that you can be watching something together, engaging together, and use some of these lines to reflect on and have a critical conversation about media use with them. So we’ll continue this in some of the Q&A we do later, but let me actually stop sharing my screen there, there we go. So to be continued.

[Marc Berkman]: Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate your work, appreciate your remarks. Just now, Sherri, you brought up an interesting concept of media that our children are consuming teaching our children about media. So I was wondering about your thoughts along the lines of age of entry onto different forms of digital media here, and age verification specifically as well. So if you could give us your thoughts on that. 

[Sherri Hope Culver]: Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the challenges about making bold, you know, sort of set statements about all of these is how different kids are and kids’ families, and whether there’s older or younger siblings in the house, I mean, all of those things can have such an impact. The age verification issue, I think is an interesting one because it’s completely…there are a number of situations that social media companies in particular could be much clearer… take clearer steps to make sure that people have access or don’t. And they choose not to, right, because these are businesses that want to make money. I think those comments that Sonia made about regulation, that just having regulations around these things, having companies take more responsibility for the way in which our children are able to enter, that’s not going to solve the whole situation. It’s not the answer, but it is an important component. And so I do think it’s important for the, you know, if we have an age of 13 when kids are supposed to get online and everybody knows that’s not what they’re doing, then what is the point of that, right? There’s got to be, there is a way for there to be clearer age verification. But I also think there are more conversations that parents can have with their kids about the why, so that it’s not just about whether or not they’ll let you go on to that site, but why would you want to go on the site? Why might I not want you to go on it yet? So we can have conversations about not just age verification from the company standpoint but from our family standpoint. What is the position we have about what is good for you, and when is it right for you to be on, and to have that conversation way before you’re actually going to make the decision. So not to wait till the child’s 13, but to actually be having conversations much, much earlier. 

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you so much, I think that’s tremendously helpful advice. So thank you, look forward to our general conversation later. And now we will turn to our next panelist here, who is Titania Jordan. Titania is the Chief Parent Officer and CMO of Bark Technologies, an online safety company that helps to protect nearly 7 million children across the United States through their monitoring app, school partnerships, and safer smartphone for kids. In 2020, she co-authored the book Parenting in a Tech World and was featured in the documentary Childhood 2.0. Her second book, Parental Control, is releasing in the spring of 2025, which we’re very excited about. So please join me in introducing Titania Jordan.

[Titania Jordan]: Hi, everyone. Marc, thank you so much for having me, Kris and the entire team, as well, it’s really really an honor. So I’m going to start my timer to make sure I stay on time, and share my screen, and get into my presentation. So we’ve already welcomed, so I’m going to go quickly past that. So as Marc mentioned, I’ve had the honor as the Chief Parent Officer at Bark to be on a lot of stages: global, national, local. And I will tell you very candidly that going live on TV—not as scary as raising my son in this world. I have one child, he is a sophomore in high school now. And I work in tech, I work in social media. I have access to colleagues like this, right, to lean on. And even still, I struggled with doing the right thing by him and for him over the past fifteen and a half years that he’s been on this planet. And so I say all of that to you just to hopefully give you some grace. We’re here to figure out the best balance for keeping our kids safer online and in real life, and how do we raise them in this world? And so I want to start with some data. While we know that parenting today looks very different than any other time in human history, we need to sometimes separate the emotion, which can become overwhelming at times from the stats. And so at Bark, we analyzed over 5.6 billion data points just over 2023 alone across 7 million children’s connected devices and accounts—social media, text, email, etc. And here’s what we found. The rate at which children experienced issues like violence, and mental health issues, bullying, these bullying incidents are way too high, way too high. Drugs and alcohol related content, self-harm and suicidal ideation, sexual content, predators online, anxiety, and disordered eating, are through the roof. And I want to go back and just make a few notes on things. One is, like I said when we first started talking, I’ve been there. This is just a representation of so many of us where we are sitting less than an arm’s length away from our children in our home, that we work hard to keep safe with, you know, Ring doorbells and carbon monoxide detectors. Yet we’re scrolling and looking at everybody’s best, brightest lives on Instagram and they might be expressing suicidal ideation, and we might not know. and that’s one of the reasons why Bark exists. That’s why we launched in 2015 to help identify these issues and bring them to parents’ attention. Now, back to the data. I want to point out with bullying specifically, that this is not just data around kids bullying others. This is being a bully, a victim or a witness. The amount of children that just watch bullying take place through group text chats is really something we need to look at, and it’s happening at younger and younger ages and stages, even before kids might have their own smartphone. It’s happening on family issued devices, for example, like an iPad, where kids just have an iCloud account and boom, they’re entered into this muck. Quickly on the drug and alcohol topic, and there’s actually an attendee listening today, Nikki Riseborough of the popular podcast Scrolling to Death, I highly recommend listening to her podcast, you’ll hear stories from parents who have children, have been able to purchase drugs and alcohol as easily as ordering a pizza online through apps like Snapchat. So we have to talk to our kids about it. On the topic of self-harm and suicide, in the United States, suicide is the second leading cause of death in children, and that is heartbreaking for a variety of reasons, absolutely guts me to think about. And also another data point: At Bark, we’re sending between 85 and 100 severe self-harm and suicidal ideation alerts to parents about their children every single day. And this is children as young as six, seven, eight years old, incredibly heartbreaking and so we’ve got to talk about this with our kids. Predators—I’ll offer some resources in just a minute—but please keep in mind that there are, according to the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there’s at least half a million known predators online at any time looking to groom and abuse your children. And this is something we all need to be aware of. So, what do we do? And that’s why I’m here in the next few minutes, to go over specific tools and strategies for parents and youth. No tool will replace a solid relationship with your child, which is where the conversations come into place. Also, your children are going to learn a lot more by watching what you do than listening to what you tell them to do. So that’s where modeling comes in, and then tools, I’ll get to that shortly. Nothing can replace open and honest conversations with your kids, much earlier than you might think. We saw some great age related graphs earlier in the presentation. Read those. Follow along with those, and more frequently than you might think. Also, you’ve got to get your head out of the sand. 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 them to. We hand them this unprecedented access. And then finally, and I know Fareedah will, touch on this as well as just being a safe place in addition to 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, 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. And the goal is not to just completely eliminate their ability to access tech, right, that’s not realistic. So we need to have conversations with them about FOMO, that’s fear of missing out. When they do have access, they’re going to be inevitably left out of things, right? On my left at least, you see a picture of Snapchat Snap Maps. If your kid has Snapchat, they can go on to Snap Maps and see where their friends are in real time, which means they can also see where they’re not, where they’re not included, and that’s gotta hurt. You need to talk to them about filtered life versus real life, and how these filters can be fun, right, If they’re like cat ears, but also they can hurt our self-confidence and sense of self-worth if we are perceiving that we need to look or be a certain way, especially to garner likes, comments, 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. They can just unfollow, and that comes from my friend Tanner Clark, because unfollowing helps to train the algorithm, And algorithms—another powerful thing to talk about with them. Every app and game that they spend time in really is working hard to keep them in that app, and so we have to remain in control of the tech and not let the tech control us. You need to have conversations around sexting. Sexting, according to a local principal, is the new first base, but that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate and we need to give our children safeguards for that. Make sure you know the laws where you live. I live in the state of Georgia in the United States, but there are laws globally that you need to talk about. Also keep in mind that at least in the United States, NCMEC, the National Center for Missing Exploited Children, has a site called Take It Down that can help your children get nudes taken down offline, and we’re so thankful for them. There’s also the Internet Crimes Against Children unit in the United States that can help, if you do encounter this. Know the slang terms, know your children’s passwords. Don’t abuse it, but just like you wouldn’t let your child live alone in an apartment with one key, don’t give them this digital access and let them have all of the control. We’ll talk about screen time, I think, in the Q&A. So I’m going to skip past this for the sake of time, but it’s not as great to have passive consumption, and better to be using tech to create, to compete, to curate. It’s about quality over quantity. So please use the built in free screen time controls that come with the connected tech that you can access in your home. And when it comes time to give your child a smartphone, I would say opt for anything but an iPhone. Bark phone is an option, but there are many options out there, we can talk about that in the Q&A, but keep in mind that Apple has broken parental controls. And I say that coming to you from a MacBook, I’m wearing an  Apple Watch, I have an Apple phone, I love Apple. But Apple is not the best for kids. Currently, Apple allows child sexual abuse material to be stored on iCloud, and I don’t think that’s a good look and I don’t support that. So additionally, there are tech contracts, there are Facebook groups that you can join, there’s a free book that you’ll get a link to in just a minute, ProtectYoungeyes.com is a great site, “Good Pictures, Bad Pictures,” great book to help with talking about porn. Free documentary, you’ll get a link to Childhood 2.0., I highly recommend watching this with older children, you can subscribe to the Bark blog. Please use time limits, filters, location tracking within reason, please don’t be a stalker. And then if you want to get alerted to issues with your children, context, and content, you can look at Bark. 

[Marc Berkman}: Thank you so much, Titania. So, full disclosure, Bark is a product that the Organization for Social Media Safety does recommend. We don’t receive any funding from any operator in the safety software industry so that is, something that we have researched and really is a tool that we believe in that protects children. And also, always inspired by Titania and her work and speaking. So with that, let me jump into a question here. You brought up briefly phone options for children, so I wanted to give you another minute or two to expand on that and what you think are safe phone options for children and at what age levels? 

[Titania Jordan]: Yeah, I’ll be super quick here because I don’t want to impede on Fareedah’s time, she’s got a lot to cover. But quickly, anything but an iPhone. Honestly. there is the Bark phone, but there’s also Troomi, Gabb, there’s Pinwheel, there are flip phones, there’s the Light Phone. Just Google safer smartphones for children and see what’s available in your area. You know, the Bark phone isn’t available outside of the U.S and we have people from all over the globe listening in. So, Google safer smartphones for kids, don’t go with an iPhone, and you’ll be better suited. 

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you so much. All right. Let us now jump to our final panelist here. That is Fareedah Shaheed. She is an award-winning internet safety expert and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. She specializes in helping parents protect their kids online. Her work has been featured in top media outlets, and she has collaborated with companies to provide valuable insights into internet safety and security for parents. So welcome, Fareedah. 

[Fareedah Shaheed]: Thank you for having me, Marc, I appreciate you. I’m going to start sharing my slides, and please let me know if it’s being seen because if not then that’s not ideal. So. So let’s talk about how to protect your kids in online games. Like every other speaker I’m going to put a timer on so I don’t go over time. So I’m CyberFareedah, I help parents protect their kids online, and Mark talked about my background, this is it. You can screenshot it if you want, and contact me if you have any questions afterwards. When I’m asked, “How do I protect my kids from online predators and online games?”, there’s only one answer that comes to mind. And this answer isn’t something that I can easily capture into words, it’s a feeling. It’s a moment in time. Specifically when I was about 15 years old– when I decided to meet a guy I had met in an online game. When I was packing my bags in what could have been the last moment my mother saw me. Back then, I didn’t understand what a predator meant, no matter how many times my mother tried to explain it to me. Because to me, he was just my friend. My safe space to be myself without any judgment or control. There are only five things that stopped me from meeting that predator from an online game. One, when my mother found out, she did not yell at me, she did not lecture me and she did not demand my phone. Now I will say that’s a normal reaction, so if you have that dont go into a guilt and shame spiral, but she didn’t do that. I was around 15 years old, I did not like being controlled, I did not like being judged and so she approached it in the best way possible. 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. When I asked my mother, like I asked her about this a year ago, and I asked her how was she able to handle this conversation so well. And one thing she said, and this is a quote from her directly, she said, “I didn’t know that I handled it well. I just wanted to keep you safe. And I knew I couldn’t do that unless I made you feel safe. So I decided to empathize with you and envision what mental space you were in right then as a teen. Then I spoke to you from that space. I thought it wisest to speak to you more like an experienced friend who was just as excited as you were to meet this guy, but just had some concerns.” And I want you to get a point of view of what we are, where we were in this relationship and point in time. She had recently got a divorce from my father. She was in a depressive spiral and when she realized that I was leaving the home and packing my bags, she genuinely thought this was the last conversation we were ever going to have. And so she didn’t even feel right to have a reaction because she knew that any reaction she had would have not ended well. So in my mother’s healing journey, she has developed a safe space for her own challenging emotions. This prepared her to beautifully hold my own challenging emotions and human flaws that night. Had this moment happened before she had the tools to deal with it, it would have ended in a disaster. 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. And this backstory is how I got into cybersecurity awareness. My background is in cybersecurity awareness, threat intelligence, and also in gaming online as a kid. So to close the loop, I did not meet that guy that day or ever. But this moment transformed my life because I started to tell her everything that I was doing online and everyone that I met, not because I wanted her to know, but because I trusted her. I told her all the funny and interesting and uncomfy situations I was in. I never feared her being judgmental or controlling ever again. And we built a very strong relationship and we are best of friends ‘til today. And of course it inspired what I do right now. This journey showed me that a parents’ relationship with themselves is way more important than your relationship with your kids. Your relationship with yourself is the foundation of your relationship with your child. How you treat yourself is how you will treat your child consciously or unconsciously, and your children need you to be there for them. But you can’t be if you’re not there for yourself. And so when she stopped being the perfect mother, right, when she stopped operating in like “in every book I read or every webinar I attend, how do I be the perfect mother?”, and she tried to work on her own self, that’s when we had the best relationship, and that is when I stopped seeking out situations that are dangerous for myself. So 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. If you don’t want them to feel like you don’t trust them when you’re talking about online safety, speak to them as if you’re the experienced friend. And typically we’re talking about kids 12 and over with this, but ask them their thoughts and periodically mention your own stories and lessons from your life. So here’s a list of effective ways to protect your kids in online games. Number one, be your own safe space. Get engaged in relaxing self-care, whether that’s one minute a day or five minutes a month, do something joyful that you love, meditate. You can join your child in their favorite games or ask them to show you how they play it. Like I have motion sickness, I can’t watch Call of Duty, but someone can show me how they play it. You can spend quality time watching TikTok, YouTube, Twitch videos. If your child enjoys anime, I loved anime, I still do til today, you can find anime that you can watch together, and CommonSenseMedia has a great resource of anime that are appropriate for kids. You can create a photo, excuse me, a folder of funny videos that they may like and you can share with them. And then finally, putting yourself in their shoes and understanding their experiences without judgment and remembering that their online life is a real life. Be vulnerable and tell stories from your own life to better understand, to have better understanding between both of you and have effective dialogs. 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. If you’re having a difficult conversation, remaining cool, calm, and collected like Titania said, you freak out inside and not on the outside is very crucial to their online safety. But guess what? You’re a human being. You might yell, scream, demand their phone, look through their texts, whatever you feel like you need to do. And if you find yourself reacting in a way that you don’t like, you can apologize sincerely. 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.” And really, I want you to be gentle with yourself. This is a marathon. This is not a sprint. Things don’t go as planned. Don’t be hard on yourself. The effort is a part of the journey. Truly, I’m not just saying that to say that as someone who’s gone through this, I’m saying it in a real practical sense. So here are three tools I highly suggest, and please screenshot this to use to protect your kids on video games. So if you’re worried about predatory behavior, explicit content, video game addiction, cyberbullying, these are resources that can help you. Number one, if you want the single most effective thing you can do to protect your kids on video games or social media, you have to heal your inner child. And we can talk about this more later, if anyone has any questions, you can DM me on Instagram, my handle is on the bottom left hand corner, message me if you have any questions, send me a voice message, I love talking to you. You can check out Doctor Nicole Lepara, the holistic psychologist. I like some of her posts. I don’t know, I just like this general resource, and you can also check out RTT therapy and SE therapy. I mentioned CommonSenseMedia. You can filter game options by age and content limits, and you can get expert parent and child reviews. And I have my own library of comprehensive tools, tips and resources for you to protect your kids based off of my own experiences as a kid online and my background in cybersecurity awareness and threat intelligence. It’s a free library using my safe method with the pillars: Safe spaces, accountability, fun and empathy, and here is the QR code. And again all of these links are on my Instagram so feel free to message if you have any questions and then put it in the chat box while we’re answering questions there as well.

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you so much Fareedah. I think we are all really fortunate to have you operating as an expert in this space. I think the field really needs experts that can speak to their own stories growing up with social media as well and you do it so effectively, so thank you. 

[Fareedah Shaheed]: Thank you Marc.

[Marc Berkman]: Let me ask you your thoughts on using built-in safety technology like Google family, built-in monitoring features into apps and operating systems themselves, versus third-party or subscription-based apps like Family Time or Bark.

[Fareedah Shaheed]: So I have a background again in cybersecurity, so all of my point of view is from a cybersecurity and threat intelligence point of view. And also as a kid who did not like being monitored online, but some kids love being monitored so it works. But for me, it would have completely destroyed my relationship with my mother. But every child is different. So number one, parental controls and parental monitoring are absolutely necessary for many families. So I’m absolutely not against it. But the second part is all technology has their safety and security controls that need to be available in them. And third-party technologies often don’t have the team, resources, money or care to have extra security. So there have been apps already that have leaked thousands and millions of kids’ data, information, messages because they did not have security. So that’s mSpy, Teen Safe and Family Orbit–all release information online. Feel free to look at it, not look at child’s information, but the news stories of these places being hacked and predators using that information to track kids. So when you’re going with third-party, you have to make sure they actually care about security. Funny enough, and this is not just because Bark is here. This is something that I’ve been like tracking to see. Bark has been one of the only places I’ve seen that has been trying really hard with security and safety. I’ve not seen any other third-party apps do that, so that’s something to keep in mind. I do love that they’re doing that. Shoutout to you Titania and your team for adding security and safety. But I typically say don’t go with third party apps. I don’t even recommend Life 360 to be honest. It’s a whole other conversation. I made a whole YouTube video on it, you can check out my YouTube channel. There’s a lot of research on different apps that don’t have security, so I definitely would stick to built-in parental controls, and then hopefully more apps like Bark that are taking security more seriously. 

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you so much. And I think now we can move into our group discussion here and get to some more of the submitted questions as well. So I want to give everyone the opportunity to give their one top-line takeaway for parents looking to improve safety for their children. And just a quick answer, speed round here to get us started. Let’s start. Let’s go reverse order with presenters, let’s start with Fareedah.

[Fareedah Shaheed]: Unmuting myself. Can you ask the question again please? Thank you. 

[Marc Berkman]: Just your top-line most impactful tip for parents who are looking to maximize safety for their children.

[Fareedah Shaheed]: Oh, absolutely. Go to therapy, work on your inner child. Nothing else matters more than that. Like genuinely speaking, you don’t have to be the perfect parent. You don’t have to have perfect kids. Work on yourself. It’s hard. But I would say that that is the single most important thing you could ever do before anything else. Unfollow me, unfollow anyone else. Just work on yourself. We all have to work on ourselves, I’m in therapy right now. Genuinely speaking, we all have childhood trauma, and if you want to protect your kids and have a safe space, how can you do that if you have not held a safe space for your own inner child?

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you. Titania?

[Titania Jordan]: Hard to pick just one, but thinking of what I wish I could have told myself even just three years ago, five years ago, ten years ago is that it’s okay for your kid to be left out. 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. And one of the biggest arguments was as an only child, wanting to be included, you know, with peers, which every parent wants their child to have friends, right, and have those quality relationships. What I didn’t realize at the time, though, is that by allowing him to be included in these, aspects 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, where I could have just prioritized, you know, in real life, playdates and other opportunities to grow as a human. So anyway, to keep it concise, please delay access for as long as possible, but do it with a kind heart and compassion and communicate clearly the why of, “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.”

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you. Sherri? 

[Sherri Hope Culver]: Good suggestions so far. I would say be conscious. Be aware of the fact that your personal, your behavior is the greatest predictor about how your kids will interact with media. So, model the behavior you want to see and give a running commentary about it. So if I’m on my phone and my daughter walks in the room and I think to myself, I’ve been on my phone a long time, I really should put it down. I actually, when she was growing up at least, would say, “gosh, I’ve been on my phone a long time, I’m just going to put it away.” So actually explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, as you’re doing it. 

[Marc Berkman]: Excellent, thank you. And Professor Livingstone? 

[Dr. Sonia Livingstone]: Yeah. Well, people have said great things. I think, I might just say that all families are different and parents feel like everyone is doing the one same thing, and therefore they have to join in and do that one thing. But actually everyone is kind of looking for people to do different things and people are doing different things. So when I go into homes, I just come out overwhelmed with how, I don’t know, one family is creative and so they’re using digital media, but they’re using it for creative things, not really for social stuff. Or another family is religious and, you know, everything is kind of done through a religious app, and it has a particular lens and particular conversations. And another family, they’re gamers. And the kids say, we’re not so interested in social media, but we love the gaming. So, you know, it’s not that any of it is better or worse, it’s different. And don’t feel everyone is doing the same thing, and you just have to fall into line. Just stick to what your values are and what you think is important about your family. 

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you. So we’ve talked today about, air quotes, monitoring strategies and then mentoring strategies. I’m wondering if you could all share or, or whoever would like to jump in on this one if you could share some tips to help parents know when, one or the other is appropriate and how to transition from this oversight role to more of a mentoring role as children get older. And so we don’t need to go in order on this one. If anyone would like to jump in here.

[Titania Jordan]: I’ll jump in quickly with what I have literally said to my son, which is there is nothing that you can do online or in real life that will ever separate you from my unconditional love. And you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to make choices and say things and do things, in a digital way that I might not agree with or condone. But please don’t ever be afraid to talk to me about it. I’m here to help you navigate this landscape. I’m not going to remove every boulder from your path, but I am going to help you navigate this rocky landscape. So be a safe space.

[Dr. Sonia Livingstone]: I suspect that we are all in favor of mentoring, and that that’s where we would start. And actually, that’s what we do kind of with, you know, from birth, you kind of mentor, you scaffold, you help your child learn, you introduce them to the world, you stand back and you watch as they explore, but you’re kind of hovering there and ready to you know, do what might be needed. So I think that is like, that is the number one, parenting role. And then the question is, is it sometimes not enough? Is some kind of monitoring, sometimes maybe when the child is kind of moving to a new school and everything is going to change all at once, or, you know, I don’t know when it might be, but I think, research on monitoring and kind of restrictive, like heavy handed top-down parenting research is pretty ambivalent. It might keep kids safer, but it stops them gaining the media literacy that we want them to have. It stops them kind of developing the confidence. And sometimes it destroys the relationship or undermines the relationship between parent and child. So I would say, you know, mentoring, enabling, scaffolding, supporting. That’s the kind of go-to and then monitoring and restricting in just as little as you can get away with to keep your child safe.

[Sherri Hope Culver]: I’ll just add that I think, hopefully it’s not frustrating to hear that so much of what we’re saying is really about parenting, just in general about parenting. And, and I say hopefully some frustrating because I think when you’re in it, you can sometimes feel like there’s this other thing that my child is involved in, this other problem where these other issues that are online and, and part of their online, in their media or technology life, but it is at the core of your relationship with your child. And being happy yourself as Fareedah mentioned. And, you know, so all of those pieces reveal themselves through the way you and your child interact with technology. But it’s really about those conscious choices that we make about parenting and, and you know, the things you’ve heard values and things like that, that you hold dear. Those are the core elements that, you know, nothing’s going to protect your child 100%. But that, I think, goes a long way to keeping the door open to conversation and having them be thoughtful about the way they interact with media.

[Fareedah Shaheed]: Plus one of what Sherri said. I also would say, and I believe all of us would agree, that trusting your gut feeling on when to switch, and you might have to go back and forth like it’s not a moment where you decide, okay, now we’re going to be mentoring, and then you don’t have to fall back into something else because the situation happened. But trusting your gut is the best. You know your family, like Sonia said, every single family’s different. There’s no typically, like, one right way to do it. There are right concepts, right fundamentals, right general approaches. But how you do it, how it looks and how it feels for your family will depend on you. So absolutely trust your gut. Just because you don’t understand gaming or social media, I have parents always ask me, “Well, you’re a gamer, you’ve been in technology. You like this, like you know more about it. How can I connect with my kid if I don’t understand gaming?”. You connect with your kid through your soul. They have a soul, you have a soul. You have a heart, they have a heart. You’re a human being. Connect as a human being. You don’t need to know tech and social media to mentor them or to help them through the digital age. 

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you all for that. Let me ask this next one we got from one of our audience members here. What resources are available that are geared directly to youth themselves to enhance safety? And whoever would like to start on that one.

[Fareedah Shaheed]: I know that Google has like a free program that they have. I think it’s called Be Internet Awesome. I don’t know if it goes all the way up to like, high school. The FBI has a program. This is all US-based. I’m so sorry. I’m pretty sure Google is a lot more international. They have it in different languages, but the FBI has something for kids all the way up to, I believe, ninth grade. And so those are some resources off the top of my head. 

[Titania Jordan]: Yeah. There’s a series from NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that is US based but any child can benefit from it. And the materials are in English and Spanish, hopefully other languages too. But it’s called NetSmartz and it’s N-E- T-S-M-A-R-T-Z. I’ll Turn the mic off and drop a link.

[Dr. Sonia Livingstone]: The question implies, the kids are gonna kind of, that they want this which I think they do. But I think perhaps we haven’t yet made it easy enough for them to find it. It’s like this organization here and this organization there. And we have to think also, like, where is it going to come together for when the kid needs it and when they find it? And I, it could be literally on their screen, like they could be, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether they could be, independent, help, you know, resources, “What do you need to know” kind of button on the screen? I think they could be, and then there’s also, you know, local organizations, can the local libraries provide a hub, can it come through schools, often that’s you know, where kids get to learn about a lot of the stuff. So schools have a key role to play. Even old-fashioned media, maybe. Public service media I would say over here, I think you have it too.

[Sherri Hope Culver]: So far. I also I think, you know, for people sometimes the media companies themselves, the tech companies themselves. Let me say this another way. There are things that the tech companies could be doing while you’re on the site that would be really helpful. And they often feel like, well, I’m not going to do that because that’s going to, you know, get kids off the site or they’re going to learn not to use it. But, you know, kids love media and technology. My experience in talking to people about media literacy, too, is that that doesn’t…the goal is not to get them off the site per se. The goal is to use it more wisely and in a way that works for them. And there was a time, I don’t know if TikTok still does this, but there was a time when, if you were on TikTok for a while and you were just scrolling, one of the things that would pop up was a young person who would say, hey, you’ve been up, because it knows how long you’re on there, it would say, hey, you’ve been on for 45 minutes, don’t you think it’s time to put it down for a little while? And it just went on from there and those sorts of like, integrated messages that could provide resources for kids could be really helpful for adults, too, it could be really helpful. And they’re not going to stop people from using technology. They’ll help them to use it more in a way that works for them, as opposed to us all sitting around talking about how dangerous the environment is.

[Dr. Sonia Livingstone]: Can I add on that? So I love Sherri’s example, and I think one of the reasons that Europe is kind of going maybe a step further in terms of regulation is to make sure that things like that example happen because no one has the capacity to say, hey, it was a good idea from TikTok, but are they still doing it? We have to like, keep checking. We, you know, it’s better in a way if regulation says this is the right way to go. TikTok knows if kids turned off completely or took a break, or you know, they know if it worked, and they don’t tell us if it worked. So part of the regulation that’s being debated is also to make sure that we all know which of these tactics work, and then we can call for more of them. And then if it’s in regulation, we’d have to keep checking. Is it still okay? Is it still okay?

[Marc Berkman]: I think that is a tremendously important point so thank you for highlighting that. Another question here. What are some red flags parents can watch out for that might indicate their child is experiencing an unsafe situation online? And again, whoever wants to jump in and take that first.

[Titania Jordan]: I’m that kid in class that’s like “Ooh me, me, me!.”. Always raising my hand first. But, you know, pay attention to signs that they aren’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? You know, any indication in your child that something has changed with them? That they’re not thriving and your gut tells you something’s off? Chances are, if they have significant digital access, that the reason for that is, is buried deep in that digital signal.

[Sherri Hope Culver]: I’ll also say, yes, and in addition to that, you need to normalize the conversation and the questions, even when it appears like everything is okay. Like I, in my family, we had some issues around depression and sometimes that was, the person looked like they were having a grand old time. It wasn’t unless I specifically asked the question that that person was honest with me with their answer. So having a just sort of general thing like this is part of what we talk about in our family. Hey, did you see anything online this week that, like, I don’t know, made you feel like I was kind of surprised I saw that that was a little scary. Like, if that just becomes part of normal dinner conversation, then there will, then they’ll answer. If you don’t ask the pointed question, if you don’t have a good, you know, if you’re not willing to go there, then, plenty of kids can present all happy and fine, but actually be having struggles on the inside. So I think you just, that you have to have, that’s got to be part of the conversation, like just ongoing in life that we talk about. And you could always be like asking for a friend, you know, not that it happened to you, but do you know, have you seen anybody in class who’s been bullying, you know, just ask the question every once in a while. 

[Fareedah Shaheed]: Adding on to share his point. is also like showing your own stories of your own life growing up as a teen and doing it casually. Like, Sherri said at the dinner table or like when you’re driving, you’re driving them back from school, or you’re going on a walk, or you’re washing dishes or cooking and they’re maybe helping you. Maybe they’re not, but whatever it is, having those discussions about your own life without any expectation of them sharing their own, so you’re normalizing you also being vulnerable. Because I know one thing as a kid, my mom would all be like, you can talk to me about anything. It’s an open door policy. This is a safe space. I never felt safe with her in that way because I was like, she’s not a human being. She’s a perfect human being. She’s a perfect mom. She’s a perfect community leader. So how can I share my vulnerable moments to her? She’s going to judge me, she’s so perfect because I never heard anything about the struggles that she went through as a teen, the struggles that she’s going through right now as a parent. And so the more you’re opening up to your kids, as much as you feel is safe in that relationship, that’s not going to give them anxiety, you know, your gut feeling. You don’t need a research study on this is your gut feeling. You’re the research study. You’re the expert on your kids, but share your vulnerable moments from your life- a bully in school, a situation that you 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 what your parents made a decision as a kid. Like, those are conversations you can open up and just say, hey, the other day I was thinking about X, Y, and Z. No expectation of your child sharing as well. When you normalize that, your child would feel better talking to you about their own struggles.

[Dr. Sonia Livingstone]: I’ll just build on what Fareedah said that I think was really great and make a point from research because I wouldn’t want parents to think that, the child, something that seems like a red flag. They talk to the child about what’s happening online, they find something bad online, and they think, okay, we’ve kind of got to the cause of it. Because what research does show over and again is that there’s also stuff going on in the rest of kids’ lives. It could be with friends, it could be with, you know, what’s happening at school. It could be worries about grades. It could be worries about you as parents. Kids worry about their parents. And you know how things are going at home as well. And often we see that it’s because of those problems that they go and they look at something online that might be depressing, or they go and they look for help, or they go and want that extra bit of support or maybe make themselves that bit more vulnerable. So yes, online can be part of the story, but it may not be where things start.

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you for that. I want to get into something where there, I’m sensing there may be some differences of opinion here, which I think is really important for us to have these conversations as we’re learning how to better protect our children online. And I’m seeing some comments in the questions as well on what we would call third-party safety software so Bark and other apps and one of one of the attendees here mentioned about reviews online and whether kids want this sort of feature being used on their with their parents and their social media use. So I want to give Titania a chance to speak to that and then the rest of you to offer your opinions on this as well.

[Titania Jordan]: Sure. And full disclosure, I was responding to where did I get my statistics, so would you mind asking me the question again?

Sure. So one attendee said that they were looking through reviews on Bark on the app store and that none of the kids seem to want this type of intervention. And you know, I’m sensing some difference of opinion on this, so I’m just wondering if you could speak to your thoughts on efficacy and appropriateness of third party safety software, and then we’ll let everyone give their thoughts as well.

[Titania Jordan]: Perfect. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, if you ask your toddler if they want to wear a seat belt or a car seat, they’re gonna be like no, right? So there’s that element of you will see a lot of low ratings from children online, rating the Bark app in particular. Not mad about it for a variety of reasons.One is that I know the life saving alerts we are sending every single day. Whether it’s protecting children from predators, suicidal ideation, disordered eating, related content, et cetera., so they can be as mad as they want. We’re saving their life. Another thing is the way we go about it, there are options out there, you know, spyware essentially, that will track every single keystroke that your child makes and send you a list of every single message that they’re sending or receiving. And we do not and will not, go down that path because we feel that children deserve to become responsible digital natives and can’t do that if their parents are essentially hovering over every little thing. And so at Bark, and children might not realize this, we only work to surface a snippet of what the potential problem might be, that if the children are being honest with themselves and mature, could probably agree that you know what a parent, a caregiver, an adult probably needs to know about this situation because I am not equipped to handle this on my own. So we only give a snippet, and then we also give best recommended next steps for how to address. Our goal is to foster a healthy parent-child relationship and not hinder it in any way.

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you. Anyone else? Yes. Professor Livingstone, I’m saying yes as if you can see who I’m looking at. 

[Dr. Sonia Livingstone]: Sure thank you. So I think the seatbelt analogy is interesting. Because, I completely agree. Seatbelts work. We know that they work, and it’s regulation that we have them and so they’re provided. But we also know that was a long struggle before seat belts got put into cars. And I think we’re kind of at that stage where the stage before and we haven’t quite worked out even like what, you know, does the seatbelt work and what it should be. So we did a review recently of whether the research shows the benefits of using parental controls, and it was like a mess. It was. Some parental controls are helpful and kids are safer. Some had no effect whatsoever. Some make things worse because they do what and tidy to sort of create tension between the child and the parent. And the child feels spied upon and there’s a workaround. And we haven’t really got a language of saying, you know, what makes for the good software? What is the good service? What is the seatbelt rather than all the stuff we have before that? So, you know, not to say anything about Bark, because it’s a new one on me. But I think we also need, kind of regulation or standards or something at the state level that says this is how we know when that’s doing a good job, because parents can’t, you know, look inside, they can’t look under the hood, they can’t look inside the box and know until they’ve downloaded it, if this is the one that’s going to be right for them. I keep going back to regulation I know, it’s the way I’m built. 

[Marc Berkman]: I appreciate that, I’m not here to participate myself. I will say that is regulation we’re working on the US without getting into the specifics

[Dr. Sonia Livingstone]: Okay, yeah, and standards, you know, standards is, and then companies can choose to say, okay, I want to show that I’m certificated, I meet that, you know, I get that tick. 

[Marc Berkman]: It’s exactly what we’re working on. So appreciate that thought. Anyone else want to jump in on this? And I think we have time for one more

[Fareedah Shaheed]: I don’t know Sherri, if you want to say something, Sherri did you want to say something before I jump in? 

[Sherri Hope Culver]: Go ahead you jump in. I wasn’t gonna respond to this one. 

[Fareedah Shaheed]: Oh okay. Well, as a kid who grew up online and is now like a fully fledged almost 30 years old, still very young, but I had my both share of adult life and kid life and teen life in the digital world. It really does depend on your family. Like some families, parental controls will work and parental monitoring will work and others will not. It really isn’t a everyone should have parental monitoring and everyone shouldn’t have it. It really is your family, your gut feeling, your child. One thing I will say and I believe that Bark says this as well, I looked at the website many times, is that you should never install it without your kids knowing it’s going to backfire against you. It’s the worst thing you could ever do unless you have a circumstance that you fear from your child’s life. And they’re running in a certain group or you don’t know where they are. And you have to do whatever you need to do to save your child. I’m not getting into that. But other than those extreme circumstances, you should never install it without your kids knowing. Because if you ask your kids, oh, I saw this text that you sent or I saw that you’re doing this, or I see that you have these thoughts. Their immediate thought isn’t, oh, my parent cares about me. They’re like, what the heck are you doing on my phone? Why are you looking at what I’m doing? I don’t trust you anymore. And the worst thing you could do is make your child feel that the predator they’re talking to, the cyberbullying group that they’re in, even though it’s a push and pull in terms of love and hate in their relationship or their friends at school care more about them than you do. So never break their trust in that way. But of course, monitoring is like, oh my God, am I breaking their trust? Have conversations with them. Talk about it with them. Make it something that’s normal and tell them, hey, it can end. It’s going to end. Because you can’t monitor them forever, right? And you need a point in time where before they go to college, preferably where they have at least a year with no monitoring so they can fail safely in your household because if they go all the way up until college, it’s my only personal view. I don’t know the research. Please everyone else, correct me if I’m wrong. So the again, personal opinion. If you wait until after they leave the house, they’re a kid in the candy shop. No one’s monitoring me anymore. I can do whatever I want, but if you give at least a year before they go to college where they can fail safely, you have a better understanding of how they’re going to act later on when they’re outside of your house.

[Sherri Hope Culver]: Okay, I changed my mind. I have to add one more thing.

[Marc Berkman]: Good, because we don’t have time for another one but we do have time for another comment. 

[Sherri Hope Culver]: Well, as you were talking, a metaphor that I often use is how we deal with, like somebody going to go through a red light. So you can have the police car sitting in plain sight of the red light of the traffic light and then as you’re pulling up to the light, you see that traffic cop there and you’re like, look, better not go through the light. There’s a cop right there. And you act appropriately because, you know, there’s a cop there. Let’s just assume you were considering going through the light, as opposed to the police car hiding behind the trees and waiting for you to go through the red light, and then woop it goes out to give you to pull you aside to give you a ticket and they caught you going through a red light. You want to stop the bad behavior. You want to protect your child. You’re, even if you’re, even if you feel differently. The fact is, if you install it without talking first and then you have to go back to your child, you are, you certainly look like what you’re aiming for is that “gotcha” moment, as opposed to putting it in there ahead of time and having what might be a difficult conversation ahead of time, but still doing it ahead of time and opening the door for there to be a more open relationship and more open conversation.

[Marc Berkman]: Thank you for that. Yeah. I think just summarizing all of that. And, I got time for a final thought here, but the need for additional regulation, the need for additional research on interventions, including third party safety softwares like Professor Livingstone said, 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. The turn impact, as well, about being clear about what the rules are and what safety interventions you may be using and tools you may be using with your children as Sherri said, I think those are all really important points that I think everyone here seems unified on. And I think it’s a really important message to our attendees. And takeaways here is that there’s a lot of different ways experts are researching and teaching for parents to improve safety for their children on the internet. There’s not one clear black and white roadmap. That’s why a panel like this is so very important. So I’m really thankful for all of you contributing your expertise and your thoughts to this conversation. I think we did stay on time here, so I will turn it back over to Kris. Thank you again for everyone who attended and spent the time to learn about this very important topic as well. 

[Kris Perry]: Thank you, Marc and the entire panel for sharing these valuable insights about children and online safety today. It is our hope that by equipping parents, caregivers, and youth with the right tools and knowledge, they can better guide and support children creating a safer online environment for everyone. And of course, thank you also to our audience for taking the time to tune in and for the many thoughtful questions. Save the date for our next Ask the Experts webinar, Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Online on September 18th at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. If you found today’s webinar valuable, please consider making a donation to support future Ask the Experts webinars and other free educational resources. Your contribution will help us continue to provide these important programs. To donate, you can scan the QR code on the screen, click the link in the chat, or visit our website at childrenandscreens.org. Finally, please take a moment to complete the brief evaluation form linked at the end of the webinar. Your feedback is invaluable in helping us improve and shape future webinars.