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Most of us who are parents now are raising children in an era unlike anything we grew up with. Artificial intelligence was the stuff of science fiction, people didn’t carry computers in their pockets because smartphones didn’t exist, and social media was also nonexistent. Thus it makes sense that figuring out how to protect your child online is uncharted territory for many parents – until it’s too late.

That’s why parents need to be proactive by making a plan to protect our kids. Keeping them offline forever is not an option, but there are steps you can take today – no matter how young your child is – to help keep kids safe on the internet.

This is a collaboration post. However, please know I stand behind everything written here, and only include links to products/services/resources I’m willing to recommend personally.

Wondering How To Protect Children Online? Read This:

I realize some of these do’s and don’t’s are going to be unpopular with your kids (and/or you!), and some may cause you to reexamine your own habits. Remember that the overall goal is helping your kids grow up into healthy, resilient, capable adults who can make appropriate decisions about their interactions with the internet and people they don’t know online.

DON’T: Model oversharing.

Are you the type of parent who’s constantly curating your family’s image online, to the point of using an iPhone mockup for that extra touch of professionalism when sharing your kiddos’ every moment with the world?

Please stop. Just stop and think for a moment.

Not only are you robbing your children of their right to privacy and self-determination online (do they really want future college frenemies or potential employers seeing those cute toddler bathtub pictures?), but you could be putting your children in very real danger. It doesn’t take much for would-be predators or bad actors to identify some families’ entire family story online – how many children they have, what their ages are, where they live, and even when their house is empty because the whole family is away on vacation.

How much easier can you make it for a stranger to approach your child in public, identify them by name, and tell them personal details that suggest they ARE indeed a “family friend” whom your child should trust? This is, of course, the opposite of keeping your kids safe. But so many parents don’t stop to think of these implications when they willingly hand over all this information to the world, day in and day out, on social media.

**DO: Teach your kids online privacy and safety early and often.**

Think of any skill you’ve learned over your lifetime. Writing with a pencil. Scoring a goal, sinking a basket, or knocking a ball out of the park. Playing a sonata on the piano.

How many of those skills did you acquire after a single lesson? Yeah, not so much.

Like any important conversation, developing good online hygiene skills should be an ongoing conversation with your kids, not a one-off. And such conversations should start long before you think your kids are old enough to understand.

Why so young? Because some school districts (including ours) now provide devices to children as young as kindergarten (!). And many parents hand their kids smartphones and tablets as pacifiers long before that.

Just as we’ve told our children from infancy that they SHOULD brush their teeth at least twice daily, they shouldn’t share toothbrushes with friends, smoking kills, and alcohol and drugs are also dangerous, we’ve taught our kids from a young age that there are certain things they should NOT do online. Namely,

share pictures of their own faces (see the DON’T above – we don’t do this for them, either, and we rarely even share our own faces!);
tell others where they live;
or reveal other personal details, including their last name (and if they’re encountering complete strangers, even their real first name).

The photo thing is especially important.

Artificial intelligence has made it oh-so-easy to sextort others by creating fake images involving real people’s faces. And it’s not just online “strangers” who might do this; even high schoolers can (and do!) generate AI nudes of classmates and peers. By sharing your kids’ faces all over the internet, you make it that much easier for your child to become a victim, too.

My own kids are aware of teens who’ve been threatened online, by people ready to blackmail underage girls with doctored photos purporting to show the girls engaging in adult behaviors, if you catch my drift. The emotional toll this sort of threat takes is enormous; why not just make it harder for your child to become a target in the first place?

DON’T: Make out-of-sight device use the norm.

Many parents are afraid of children being accosted by strangers in dark alleys. In the internet age, that mental image is woefully out-of-date. All a stranger needs is an internet connection to access your child. And a child using a device alone in a bedroom is a prime target for online actors with ill intent.

It doesn’t take much for a lonely teen to be persuaded to send, say, a nude selfie to a near-stranger. Device use in kids’ bedrooms, with the doors closed, make it that much easier for kids to snap that image and send it off before they’ve had time to think about what they’re doing. That selfie can then be used as leverage over the teen (no AI generation needed!) to encourage them to engage in self-harming behaviors, up to taking their own life.

Think your child can’t become a target? Think again. We all have bad days, and all it takes is one “down” moment for kids to become vulnerable.

DO: Normalize device use, including homework, in communal areas.

When my kids were in elementary school, my own mama asked when I was going to finally get them homework desks for their bedrooms. My reply? NEVER. She was taken aback, until I reminded her that homework these days requires devices.

This is why I’m such a big advocate of thoughtfully planning out a homework station for your kids, WITH their input. This may inconvenience the grownups a bit. I admit, I do most of my blogging work when the kids are home on the living room couch – not my home office – so I can better supervise homework detail; ditto my husband and his lesson planning/grading. But it’s easier to supervise our kids’ online activities this way, since they almost never have offline homework.

Having homework on devices occur only in public places is especially important for neurodivergent kids, who may need extra help and/or extra supervision. Even if your child doesn’t have, say, ADHD, texting with friends can be a lot more fun and engaging than cranking out an essay. Dear Husband and I have been known to take away non-school devices during homework time, and even to force our kids to Airplay their screens to the living room TV screen, in an effort to keep them on task with assignments. It may sound cruel, but it works.

DON’T: Let kids go to sleep with their devices.

Getting a good night’s sleep has long been an obsession of mine, partly for my own sake and partly because my own kiddos’ relationship with good sleep is a work in progress. And one thing experts agree on, for both kids and grownups, is that screens and bedtime are NOT a good mix.

Teens, in particular, are NOT getting enough sleep when they take their smartphones to bed with them. The blue light inhibits natural melatonin production, and texting with friends late at night is not conducive to the brain’s winding down and shutting off.

And poor/inadequate sleep can not only make your teen cranky and irritable, it can also lead to weight gain, slipping grades, driving accidents, and so much more. Why would you want to willingly do that to your child?

DO: Model healthy boundaries.

Yes, that means that you, too, may need to rethink your relationship with your phone.

My phone charges in our ensuite bathroom overnight, NOT next to my bed. I use an old-fashioned digital radio alarm clock to wake up in the morning, or else set a silent alarm on my Fitbit. Even though they both have such old-school clocks in their rooms, too, my kids use their Fitbit watches or their mp3 players to set alarms.

Because my phone is so far away from me, I don’t scroll last thing before I go to sleep or first thing when I get up in the morning. I admit that sometimes, as I am getting ready for bed, I will do one last check of the headlines, or open the weather app to check out tomorrow’s forecast. But that’s it. Then I walk to the next room and crawl into bed.

My kids know that I don’t check texts or social media last thing before falling asleep or first thing in the AM. They know that doing so is NOT conducive to good sleep, and goodness knows they already have a hard enough time winding down to sleep on their own.

And while you’re at it: Consider keeping your kids smartphone-free for as long as possible

Another reason our kids don’t have this problem of smartphone use before bed is because between the two of them, only our 15-year-old has a phone (and a flip phone at that!). The 13-year-old’s school doesn’t allow phones, which makes it easier for her to not have one; the 15-year-old messages friends through other means than her phone, with our full knowledge and blessing.

We’re big proponents of the Wait Until 8th movement, which encourages parents to keep their kids off smartphones at least until 8th grade. And we’re not alone. Tech executives from Microsoft founder Bill Gates to Apple CEO Steve Jobs severely limited their own kids’ access to phones and social media. The same is true for actress Drew Barrymore, who like Bill Gates wouldn’t let her kids have phones until age 14. Other celebrities like Kate Winslet have taken things one step further, along with plenty of tech execs, by joining the Smartphone Free Childhood movement.

What do these people know that has them all in agreement on keeping smartphones away from their kids as long as possible? It’s really quite simple: research demonstrates that younger brains are especially susceptible to negative effects from phone use in general and social media in particular, with harms ranging from being short on sleep to depression. Yes, my kids sometimes complain about not having smartphones; but they also get really annoyed when friends are glued to their own phones and can’t interact IRL (in real life).

DON’T: Throw up your hands and plead ignorance.

I know it can be challenging to stay on top of the latest music, slang, microtrends, and other aspects of your kids’ cultural milieu. But as parents, it’s our job to try. Even if that means going outside our comfort zones a bit.

The former associate pastor at my church, a 40-something man with three tween/teen daughters, felt his ability to connect with them slipping away as they got older. So he learned how to play Roblox games with them, in order to meet them where they were at. This took him way out of his comfort zone. But it was a much better – and more caring – response than giving in to the fact that their worldview and the things they cared about were moving further from his own zone of familiarity.

And as he played with them, Pastor John found it was much easier to have casual conversations with them about what was going on at school, with their friends, and in their own lives.

DO: Get involved, educate yourself, and monitor.

You can follow the example of Pastor John and start playing video games with your kids. But there are plenty of other areas where parents can afford to educate themselves, starting with reading the posts and articles hyperlinked above.

Ultimately, though, you need to do your own research – whether on which options you want to use to monitor your kids’ online activity, knowing what your school uses (or doesn’t) to monitor device traffic on their networks, which websites your child is visiting on their personal devices, or what your kids and their friends are discussing in their texts.

My husband and I are administrators on our children’s personal laptops. This means we can set time limits on certain websites and apps, or block them completely – techniques we’ve used to wean one child off of a Minecraft addiction some years ago, and to get the other child to stop messaging friends constantly as an avoidance tactic during homework time.

We also know the passwords to their devices, which means we can log on after they’re in bed to read their messages, check their browsing history, etc. They know that we can monitor anything they do online, and that we will periodically check their online activities.

In this sense, they have an advantage over several of their friends, who don’t realize their parents regularly read their texts (or monitor their browsing history). When one of our daughters was in distress awhile back, within 24 hours of our learning of this through their online messaging, two friends’ mothers reached out to us to report what they’d learned from reading their daughters’ texts with our child. (And then asked us NOT to mention this to our daughter, since their own children didn’t know they were being monitored this way!)

The short version of how to keep kids safe online:

We can’t shelter our kids completely from the internet, and sticking our own heads into the sand like an ostrich isn’t going to solve anything. What we CAN do is teach our children how to be safer online, and model best practices through our own behaviors, so that they are less vulnerable to the threats that do exist in dark parts of the web, as well as the dangers of spending too much time on their phones in general, and social media in particular.

What steps have YOU taken to keep your children safe online? Let us know in the comments!

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