When I was preparing to speak at the Family Online Safety Institute, I came up with four essential skills that I want my child to have both online and in the real world.
📚Literacy is paramount before safety. If we don’t know how things work, we don’t know how to stay safe. If we’re unsure as parents, we can model that by digging in with our kids. A great way to do this is to set up a device, browser, or customize settings of something together with your child. If you don’t know, model googling it to find out, or try changing the settings to figure it out together. This applies outside of tech! Talk about how to find things in a store, what to do when you don’t know how to do something, how to read instructions and maps, etc.
🧠Critical thinking is a broad term, but my favorite question to ask to assess critical thinking is simple: does this make sense? Pull up a meme, a viral post, a claim you hear online or on the news, and assess it together. Does it make sense? What questions does it bring up? Where can you go to get more info? I also like the CARS acronym for assessing sources and information: credible, accurate, reasonable, supported.
🦺Risk assessment applies to so many parts of our lives. We want kids to know how to tell if a person is safe, or trustworthy, what information is safe to divulge and to whom, how to know if someone is being erratic or disingenuous. Again, these apply online and in real life. If you discuss who it’s safe to tell your address or phone number to, include who it’s safe to tell that to online.
🆘Finally, how to get help. Whether it’s because they snuck out of the house, sent a photo they shouldn’t have, or overheard something, we want kids to know how and when to get help. Starting from a place of safety, when we show interest and validity in our kids’ interests, we’re showing them that if something goes awry and they need help, we’ll be there. Our job is to keep them safe, and while that safety may include a revised or strengthened rule or boundary in the future, our primary focus is going to be on their safety, and we won’t punish them or shame them for seeking help.
What ways do you address these skills with your kids?
