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Sing it with me, parents: It’s the most wonderful time of the year ...
But like all holidays, Back To School has its dark side, and not just the fact that you now have to forklift your children out of bed at dawn.
You've got to do a reset on your family’s cyber safety rules. Your child is now one year older, and what worked last year may not be enough this year. New media tools such as cell phones, Facebook and SMS (short message system) texting present you with an new parenting challenge that goes well beyond the 90's concern about online porn and hate speech. Particularly true as your child edges into the middle school and then high school years. It’s not just about what predators and bad actors can do to them. It’s also what they can do to each other.
During the summer, you have much more direct control over your child’s life - online and off. Sure, you always have to be vigilant, but in a middle-class household, the computer your child is using to go online is probably the family PC, hopefully located in your family room where you can supervise its use. If your kid is the one that tends to get picked on by the classroom bullies, you send him to a different summer program than the mean kids. And so on.
When school starts, however, you don’t have the same visibility into your child’s daily life. Starting in the upper elementary grades, most US schools offer some form of technology class during which the kids have access to computers. If your child plays at friends’ homes after school, you are at the mercy of another parent’s cyber safety savvy.
In this post, I’m going to offer a few suggestions of things you can do to keep your child cyber safe and happy in the coming year.
Online Use In General
Before the social media explosion, the two biggest issues with online use were content and time. What are my children seeing, and how long are they online (when they should be doing their homework)? These are still part of your cyber safety mix, although they have most definitely been overshadowed by the new problems presented by Facebook and malware laden websites.
Most US public schools use some sort of security software. Some by choice, others due to legislation passed in 2001 that required them to have an Internet safety policy that includes technology protection measures in order to secure e-rate funding. As a parent, you have every right to ask your school what it does to secure students’ online privacy and safety.
At home, whether you decide to use parental control software or not, you must have the cyber safety talk with your children. I’m not the first person to make this comparison, but it’s apt -- the cyber safety talk is the new sex talk. And it’s nearly as hard, and you have to do it even earlier.
Some important ground rules:
- Internet use in the home is a privilege, not a right.
- Keep the computer your kids use in a family space.
- Passwords are private and so is your personal information. Don’t tell either to anyone online. Your real-life friends already know where you live, and your online friends don’t need to know.
- If you choose to use parental control software, explain why to your kids, and involve them in the limit setting.
There are more great information and resources at ConnectSafely, and if you’re in the market for software, check out PC Magazine’s annual review of parental control software.
ConnectSafely also has a great tip sheet for strong, secure passwords. I’d add one more piece of advice -- if you are helping your kid get set up on social networks or websites, don’t use YOUR passwords for them. I worked in the online security industry for 10 years, and should have known better, but I did this when I helped my son set up the 39 Clues website. I used the same password I now used to use on PayPal. Yup, you guessed it. He used my computer one day to log onto Facebook (with my permission), decided to buy himself some Facebook credits and successfully guessed my password to purchase via PayPal (not with
