There are many things we can be doing to safeguard our children online and, the good news is, we don’t need a PhD in Computer Skills to do it. We are parents, we are educators, and we can do this! What we need is knowledge; we need to find out what children are doing on the Internet. We need to find out what they are potentially being exposed to on the Internet and then we also need to find out what we can do to protect them from the excessive information on Internet. After all, knowledge is power! The more knowledge we have about what our kids are doing online and what they may be exposed to, the better equipped we are to protect and educate these young and most vulnerable surfers.

Our children are in cyberspace for three basic purposes: to browse the Internet, to play games and to connect with others. Within this triangle of activity lies a wonderful, creative and opportune space for our children to experience, experiment and learn.

However, like most things, there is a flip side and this is the side where our parenting and protection is crucial: there are potential threats to our children, in fact, threats we are all vulnerable to if we do not take the time to identify them. It is true that no anti-virus or filter will ever be 100% effective at keeping unwanted elements and aspects of cyberspace out of our homes and away from our children. However, these things coupled with our committed involvement, can go a long way to ensuring that our children are safe, well-adapted cyber-citizens who will have the confidence and knowledge to know what to do when faced with any cyber threats.

Many of us may not have grown up with computers or the Internet. These are skills we’ve picked up (to varying degrees) along the way, either due to work, personal curiosity or necessity. Our children ARE, however, growing up with these devices and the Internet. While the use of these devices may not be intuitive to us, our children are quickly able to pick up on how to use and navigate them with little or no difficulty. The gap between our knowledge and our children’s knowledge is not necessarily problematic, but our complete lack of knowledge of these devices and what they are capable of, most certainly is!

We can’t protect our children from unknown forces. We can’t protect them from things we don’t know or understand. This seems to be one of the key reasons that monitoring our children’s online activity does not receive the high priority it deserves. However, we cannot, as diligent parents, responsible educators and ultimate protectors of children, remain blissfully ignorant and of the websites our children can access that encourage self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, pornography, violence and crimes against children.

Children eventually have to navigate their way through cyberspace, be it for school and university research projects, job applications, travel arrangements, etc. So, instead of hiding our children from the cyber world, we should educate ourselves about how to deal with such situations so we can teach our children how to behave like responsible cybercitizens. If we know what our children are being exposed to online, we can prepare them better for the options available to them: be it blocking a cyber-bully or reporting websites advocating violence, cruelty or racism.

We know our children want to experience the digital world for themselves and they want to meet new friends. But we need to understand that their communication and their interactions are worlds away from what ours were at their age. Instead of fearing cyberspace as unchartered parent-territory, we should embrace it and trust in our abilities as parents because, despite the huge explosion of the digital and techno world, the underlying principles of basic morality and human decency remain the same. So, although some of us are constantly trying to keep up with advances in technology, we can at least rest assured that we are ahead of the game in certain respects. Plus, we do have common sense on our side! The lessons we teach our children in the real world about how to look after and conduct themselves are, by and large, transferrable to the digital world.

So, what does this all mean for us? It means we need to get a little bit tech savvy. It means we have a little bit of homework to do: We need to educate ourselves and we need to seek the knowledge that will empower us to afford the protection our children deserve! We are duty-bound, as we want the best when it comes to our children’s well-being and safety.

Here are 10 great tips that can help to keep our children safe in Cyberspace:

1. Understand your child’s device and what, when and how they can access the internet
2. Our children learn and develop behaviours that they see and experience – we, as responsible adults, must model good and healthy online behaviour that our children can emulate.
3. Child-proof the cyber world by activating parental controls on your child’s device. The majority of the current devices already have built in software.
4. Set guidelines and boundaries. This includes proper online conduct, what to do if they come across content that makes them uncomfortable and what sites they are permitted to access.
5. Position the family computer in a communal area. In this way you are offering your child the best safety software with the highest and most robust parental controls – you are offering them yourself! In this way you can monitor their behaviour – this will give you a good indication if things are not as they should be.
6. Teach children the importance of privacy and privacy settings and be clear about what information they can share online and what information they must not. Personally-identifiable information can act like bread crumbs that lead straight to your front door!
7. Communicate regularly with your children about their online activities and show an interest: encourage them to share their experiences and what they are doing online.
8. Teach children online social responsibility. The internet is an open and shared environment. We can instil in them, a sense of community – in which all interactions are friendly and fair.
9. Learn how to take screenshots, how to block people and content and how to report inappropriate and/or offensive content so that you can teach your children how to do this too.
10. Let your children know they can come to you about anything or anyone online without fear of reprisal and, if a problem does arise, it should be dealt with – in a calm and rational manner, to ensure that your children will continue to confide in you if/when they encounter a problem.

Written by Kerry-Ann Ferreira, Author of Protecting our Children in Cyberspace (available through Kindle, Amazon)