Helping your family have a safer online experience
During a recent WhatsApp conversation about Roblox and account restriction settings with some friends I realised that as I am a parent of boys and several friends are parents of girls (as well as some who are parents of both), there will be different things that we are worried about in terms of online safety … Read More “Parents of Boys, Parents of Girls, Parents of Both” »
One of the most interesting topics and the one that raises the most discussion in our Free Online Safety Session that we deliver to parents is the information that can be gathered by sharing photos online. Let us first show you what information can be gathered. We were delivering an Online Safety Session at a … Read More “Sharing an innocent picture can give away your child’s location.” »
Are you questioning how much screen time is healthy for your children due to the conflicting advice from the industry “experts” ? As a parent of a 6 year old and an 8 year old I wonder about the impact of screen usage but to me its significantly more important what they do on the … Read More “Screen Time – A Parents Thoughts” »
Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo (and lots of others) are the main way that information is retrieved from the Internet. Unfortunately, it is all to easy for inappropriate information to be retrieved as shown by the NSPCC article https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/parental-controls The article shows how searches on words that a child would be interested in … Read More “How to make your childs searches safer and more accurate” »
When you or your child browse the App store for an age appropriate app or game, (we will use app to describe both app and game in this article), you might assume that Apple have verified that the app is appropriate for that age group as per the Apple age rating! For example Splitter Critters … Read More “How do Apple determine age rating of an App ?” »
There are two main areas on the Internet that children can freely find inappropriate content. One is with a search engine such as Bing, Google, Yahoo etc and the other is YouTube. YouTube was founded by three PayPal employees as a video sharing website to allow users to share video content. On February the 14th … Read More “YouTube – A parents perspective.” »
As parents, we know there will be conversations that will be difficult to start with our children and parenting in a digital age means there is another one to add to the list! Engaging in productive and positive conversations with our children about “Staying Safe Online” is difficult but it is crucial to helping our … Read More “Start that “Staying safe online” conversation.” »
As parents when our children sign up for clubs and activities in the real world we can easily check age suitability, in the digital world children can create a digital age to help them gain access to clubs and activities online that may not be age appropriate and can open very real world risks for … Read More “Social Media – Why you need to check your child’s age on their accounts.” »
Several years ago, while Jim Gamble was the head of CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) I remember listening to him speak and explaining that child pornography is not the language that should be used to describe sexual images of children, it is Child Abuse, this statement has stayed with me. Pornography is a … Read More “Its Child Abuse not Child Pornography.” »
In our house we don’t keep secrets, just surprises. One of the most powerful weapons child abusers have is to get children to keep secrets. They often start with small secrets to see if the child keeps these and then the predator will slowly progress onto darker secrets after earning the families and child’s trust. … Read More “No Secrets…Just Surprises !” »
