The tight rope act
We want to keep our children safe. We want to make sure our children reach adulthood, ready to handle the challenges of the world on their own.
And it is those two desires, those two parental responsibilities, that make us parents walk a tight rope, striving to find a difficult-to-find balance.
There’s a very “easy” way to keep our children safe, or more correctly, a straightforward way, if we go to the extreme. Keep them in. Pad the walls. No Sharp corners. Watch them like a hawk.
Obviously, this is not something we would like to do for many reasons. Our personal sanity and theirs, being ranked very highly among those…
But a more specific reason is that the more we externally impose limits on our children, and the more we keep those limits up, the less they will be prepared for adulthood – where they go out into the world on their own. The freedom of adulthood doesn’t mean they should do whatever they want – for their sakes and for others. Internally imposed limits are an important aspect of being an adult. Knowing how to balance your wishes against the potential negative outcomes of what you may want to do is critical to keep you, and others safe, for one.
If the first time ever they try to create that internal balance will be after they leave our care, there’s less of a chance they’ll succeed. They need to practice.
Anything I said up until now is true towards the physical world as it is to the online world. What makes the online world particularly challenging for parents?
The added challenges of being online and keeping our balance
The key to balancing the limits we impose to keep our children safe while preparing them for their adulthood, is a gradual approach.
The younger the kids, the more limits they have, and then, gradually, they can be in another room without us watching, cross a street on their own, and later go to a neighboring friend’s house.
However, while online, we parents don’t necessarily understand how to create such a gradual approach. It all feels like an “all or nothing” type of deal as the through the doors of the Internet our children can travel to any content and meet any person. Sure, we can set up parental control (and now we need to be tech-savvy to do that) and block – but now what do we need to block? What can be considered “safe gradual reasonable steps”?
Another challenge is that we, the parents, are sometimes afraid of the can of worms that might be opened when we dive into what the child might be doing online. It can be mentally challenging for us to take the first step in teaching our children how to stay safe. We don’t have examples. We weren’t taught that, and in many cases, the Internet didn’t even exist when some of us parents were kids.
A deep calming breath
I’ve been teaching cyber safety to children and parents for years now. While understanding the required terminology is not a long process, this text will still provide just the first steps.
The first thing I can offer is that while the fear of dangers is important, it should not lead us. We are not doing this because the world is dangerous, we are doing it to prepare our children for the world, challenges and all, cyber or not. The fact the balancing act I mentioned exists outside of the online realm, yet we’ve dealt with it and our parents have dealt with it – should allow us to relax. It’s doable.
And it’s doable without being tech-savvy – if we understand the new terminology of the online realm that is underlying the technology, and its parallels to the physical world.
The second thing I can offer is to remind us our children start out as oblivious to the dangers and challenges of the world. When they do something wrong it is more important sometimes to verify they understood what they did wrong and WHY it was wrong before tackling the fact they did it. And when we focus on that, and have the terminology to pinpoint the reason, which is usually a challenge for even us adults – it then both becomes the reason we give them limits and explains what they need to learn until they reach adulthood. A child who sees the path ahead is much more likely to accept the current limits, especially when they understand that adulthood doesn’t resolve complications magically and we need to learn how to rise to certain challenges on our way there.
Back in the ring to take another swing
So how to start?
To recognize the two greatest challenges that have always existed, but the Internet has made more challenging than ever before.
First, our need as parents to teach our children to transition from “Don’t talk to strangers” as children, to the magical way it transformed to how we are calling that interaction as adults – “Meeting New People” (but… safely, while choosing who to listen to, who to bring into our lives).
The Internet has created a doorway through which our children can be exposed from a very early age to “everyone in the world and their content”. And not only that, many of those strangers are actually fake profiles or software, pretending to be people (bots), and now AI is in the mix as well).
And second, our need as parents to teach our children to think before they act. This while the Internet has made “actions” so easy and simple. Clicking, sharing, finding content full of opinions and stories that look like truth and news, commenting, uploading… The simpler it is to act, the less likely we are to think before performing it.
It is interesting that to address the first challenge, we must understand ‘WHY the other is saying and doing,’ while for the second, we need to ask ourselves, ‘WHY are we saying and doing this?’ in a mirrored reflection.
A gradual approach must focus on enhancing our children’s abilities to answer those questions and explaining to them that when they cannot answer those questions well, they are still too young.
Another important gradual approach would be to first use the online sphere so our children can practice those questions when they interact with their friends and family, including us, before approaching strangers.
Netzer Shohet is a father of three, and has been teaching Cyber Safety for years to children, parents and adults. He is the author of an Amazon bestselling book “The Cyber Safe Child” and publishes many tips and other Cyber Safety related content in the Facebook page of the book.