Who is safe online? Watch this with your kids

A 90 second digital literacy lesson that will start many important conversations

A 90-second digital literacy lesson: who is a safe person?

It’s easy to feel like digital literacy and safety are skills that kids are absorbing through technology USE, but that is not the case. While they are building comfort and fluency in technology, that can actually make it harder to stay safe as they may feel comfortable but not have knowledge of the safety skills they need.

My favorite way to frame digital safety conversations is to take the “digital” out of it- I find it makes it so much easier to approach as a caregiver and educator.

If we want our kids to know who is safe online and what information is safe to share online, a simple way to do that is to remove the “online” and define: who is a safe person?

Thanks to resources like Comprehensive Consent and Sex Positive Families, among many others, I define a safe person as you see in the video. You may have a different definition and that is FINE- use this as a way to talk about what a “safe” person is in your family and how you can tell.

Then talk about how this applies both online and in the real world- what is something someone might ask for in the real world that could be unsafe (phone number, address), and how might that be different online (address, phone number, password, email). If someone makes us feel unsafe at school, who should we go to? What about at someone else’s house? What about in a text chat or DM? What about in a voice chat in a game?

Starting it this way begins the conversation so we can come back to it, and allows it to be collaborative with our kids as they grow.