Internet Safety for Children

Internet DNA Podcast

Online safety for kids, the potholes of being a parent with these digital natives. This podcast touches on family sharing, screen time, good and bad apps and games such as Whatsapp, SnapChat, Fortnite, TikTok and more -  trust, responsibility, dialog, trolling, what not to post, privacy, communication, life gaming and streaming, a short rant about weirdos! 

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

Hello and welcome to this week's episode, internet DNA with me, Abby and me done this week we're going to talk about internet safety for children. To be honest, I don't know a parent that isn't worried about it. So let's get rid of a few myths, put some good guidelines in and generally discuss whether we should all be scared and what we should do to help our kids live happy, healthy, online and offline lives. So I know that you're just waiting there to say something really controversial about this. Now there's me being the good mother going, Oh, you know, I've just put family sharing on and they mustn't download apps without me looking at, and they mustn't spend too much time on screens and they shouldn't have this app. But do you want to dive right in and say what you think? I started where every parent starts, which is the idea, we must control everything. And so I got a piece of software called Custodio and we installed it on their phones and I've made sure that their phones are all hooked up via Apple family. So I knew where they were and I did it on the X box and actually I came across three issues. The first issue was I don't think the ratings for games are correct. Secondly, I found that a lot of what Custodio did was got moved from being able to do their homework because he only allowed them to go on super safe and overly kitty sites children when they're getting to teenagers, they don't want to be on kitty YouTube or kitty face because it's for kids and they're starting to feel that they don't want to be associated with kids. The other thing is we're going to go back to black mirror. There's an episode where a mum just spends her whole time looking at what her daughter's doing and it ends up in a bad way and I think actually it's a cautionary tale. Parents are too controlling and because they have the ability to control, they do so. So a cousin of mine went to a party, his grandfather came to pick him up. His grandfather was five minutes late and his mother texted him going, where are you? Why is Richard not with you? Because she was tracking him on his phone, which bearing in mind the boys 17 [inaudible] pissed them off and we made him switch off his w his mum from his phone. So I know where my boys are cause I've got them as find my friends basically, but I never use it unless less to go get them not interested in what they're doing in their private lives. There's a lot of this is you wouldn't read someone's diary and there's a whole thing, Oh you should be reading that social media, you should be reading, they should be checking this. You should reach out. I just feel personally having three boys, that ends up being a panic for the parents. You don't understand the way they use the language and it just causes a load of concern about effectively very little. Now that's not to say there aren't genuine concerns on the internet because there are, but the way to deal with them, I found most effectively is to talk to the children in an adult manner about why certain things should be thought about before we do them. I agree that you can go a bit too far. I've come at the whole children's security online from quite a relaxed way because I work online every day. It's very much part of my life. And I want my children to grow up with a balanced and learned understanding of the internet. So it's a bit like not ever letting your children have sugar and then they go boof, the moment they're out of your control and eight tons of sugar or sending a girl to a convent school. And the moment she gets out of the convent school, she goes a bit, well, I want them to learn from an early age, not to put stupid stuff on. I don't want to be so controlling that I'm not letting them learn and make mistakes by themselves. And so I didn't have family showing on because I wanted to let my children know that I trusted them enough for them to tell me what they were putting on and have a discussion about it. And they did. And I wasn't on ticked up because I wanted them to tell me what they were doing on TechTalk. And I don't have it on private at the moment for my child either, but she's only allowed to look at her friend's feeds, not there for you feeds and to see without actually any blocks on how that works and what she's doing. Now. I know the other side of the tick tock story of there are so many trolls or 70 people looking, you've got to be really careful. You mustn't let them on. I mean she's 10 and the age is 13 so I am very aware and now I have got a tick tock account mainly because she wants me to like her videos and I'm interested to see what comes in to me. What sort of comments I get is she now posts some of my art on my account for me and I'll be interested to see how bad it is. I've read some scandalous articles about the evilness of tick tock and how it promotes mental illness, how it promotes hurting herself, how it promotes anything that's unhealthy for a child, how it's trolled, how it's also, it's a piece of software that's used to aid other things to Snoop and to learn from the images and things on there so that the company which isn't making money out of it can use it to be better at facial recognition or understanding humans online cause that's being used as a product to help in of spying snooping world. I don't know if this is true, does it not sound to you a little bit like the same things that were thrown at rock music or dance music or television or, I wasn't around when radio was first brought in, but you know, it's this reactionary stones by adults who don't understand new technologies or new things that it must be evil. Let's own it. Accentuate the six bad store, you know, it's the layer bets, ecstasy. Everyone dies on us. No, and the problem with it is, is much likely about who became almost before memes were around. But she became a meme for the stupidity of the information that you were given because anybody who was in that dance mode knew that that just wasn't the general case. In fact, that it was an extremely exceptional case. What it did was made people of that generation just think that all information given to you by adults and the media was just rubbish and that's far more dangerous. I do agree that every generation, parents think that whatever you are doing is wrong and evil are going to affect you forever and it happens that for us as parents, it's computers and social media and social interaction through gaming. It's the social side that people scared about creating these funky videos for tech talks, fantastic and creative and really good at learning how to use computers and apps and problem solving in games is really good, but it seems to be a Terra for the communication side of it. There's nothing wrong with tech talk, they're awesome articles on it, but you go to any internet forum, anything you want where you get random people able to vent their opinions, you get assholes. I'm sorry. That's just the internet. In fact, that's just the world. What it teaches you is that when people feel that they're anonymous, there are a lot less nice than when they're not. This stuff is not new. There's new avenues to it. It probably makes the initial approaches a lot easier and that's why you need to talk to your children. Think about what people are doing. They will grow up with this much more naturally than us. For us it's a terror, but for them this is going to be the way that a lot of their social interaction will happen and they will natively understand who's a weirdo. My children talk about Petos all the time. They're so over sensitized to it that actually I think that they will develop an awareness. My worry is is that they become so over sensitized to it that they become numb to it. Coming back to the social interaction on technology, that's the thing. I want them to grow up and learn for themselves and understand to be careful and more information not to share. I don't want to be the one policing it because then they'll never learn. So that's how I'm working with tick-tock where the 10 year old at Mount, which is very different from a lot of people I know. But then I have issues with other social media. For example, Snapchat. I won't let my 10 year old or my 11 year old on Snapchat because I hear a lot of teenage stories about how they are so drugs on Snapchat. So for me that one does feel too old. There is a law that says no one under 13 on all social media. In fact, now those companies know how old you are. They don't have to ask you what your birthday is. They know who you are. Facebook knows who you are, Google know who you are, tick top, know who you are. And so the obligation should be placed onto the companies. If we find people underage registered on your device, you will get fined and there is no excuse to go, Oh well we didn't know. Well, if you don't know, if you can't prove that they're over 13 then don't give them an account like underage drinking. There's no, Oh, I didn't know excuse. So what do you think about my madness with Snapchat then? I'm an older chap, unfortunately I don't like to think of myself that way, but I am. My youngest doesn't have a phone or an iPad. He's 10 my two elder ones, they're at secondary school and everyone has a phone. And while they use the word bullying, where we would have used the word teasing, which confused me at first, but they spend an inordinate, and to me slightly disconcerting the amount of time chatting with them on texts. But I remember my mom telling me to get off the Walkman all the time. [inaudible] phones off. Why I'm listening to music, like [inaudible] going to kill me. And I think that we have to be very careful that we're not just worried about a thing that is just not what we knew about when I was a child. There was nothing. You basically had to stick in a ditch and you got on with it. Yeah. And a lot of explosives that seems that children that aid were a bit sort of gung ho with the chemicals you could get from the pharmacy and blowing things up and sticking sticks in pitches dangerous than sitting next to on a screen is actually, and I spent a vast amount of my life bored to tears. Yeah. Learning how to be bored. Learning how to be utterly Stonewall board in the back of a car for three days to the South of Spain. You learn how to be born and you learn how to deal with being bored and maybe there's no value in learning how to be fraud. I agree with you. I think it's a really good lesson to learn how to be bored, but why? I don't know. Because the internet might end and then what are you going to do apart from have to be [inaudible]. Then when we were born, what did we do? We read books and now we're like, Oh, you're way to read more books. And they're like, yeah, but I'm not bored. And so it's very difficult to understand what is being reasonable about it or is saying, well, okay, I'm sure if I'd had a device I wouldn't have read as many books as I did read. Yeah. I think different children are different so I'm going to move on to fortnight now I expect your boys are on fortnight. What do you think about it? The real thing about Fortnite is the incessant pressure to buy this weak skin, that weak skin, this battle pass more gold coins because you're on and you're in last week skin and everyone's like basically like when we were young, you know you're still wearing flares. It's that but it's constant and it's an all weekly basis so the micropayments side of it and the pressure on young children to conform to that micro pressure I think is evil, but then again we're going back to this thing they know my child is 13 they should not be able to allow to offer young kids those things. There's good things about it and that your working as a team with your, but they won't talk about my youngest again. She got on it with a friend of hers and I asked her to uninstall it and all hell let loose. She did uninstall it. But my reason for not having fortnight was that she is completely obsessive personality. And the only thing I've seen about Fortnite is that the people that play Fortnite play it obsessively, absolutely can't do anything else. And now, if it was my other daughter who's not really particularly obsessed about things, I wouldn't have minded. But I was worried that the moment she got into this, she literally would do nothing else. So I said, no. Now what you've done is you've turned it into a magic thing. It was really hard and I nearly wavered. So now she's going to sit around the metaphorical bike sheds playing fortnight. I'll give you my example, which is all, although is 13 he got some money for Christmas and he bought grand theft auto. Now this is the only game I've said to my kids. No, it's misogynistic and encourages criminality. And it's just this random violence to innocent civilians. You know, you're in a military game when you're shooting other soldiers. Well, fair enough. They're intended combatants. If you're in fortnight issuing other players that are shooting you. I don't mind that I've got boys might be slightly different with girls and not sure. The thing about fortnight is very cartoony. The game itself is, there's nothing wrong with it. Say it was more addictive than other games, is it? Cause it's the game of the moment. There was a period in time three years ago when it was really big where everyone did that dance. I'd never seen a game where it translated into the playground. In that sense, all they were doing was doing the different dances from Fortnite. So even if you hadn't ever played Fortnite, you were already obsessed with it because it was about the dunks and I thought it was an absolutely phenomenal piece of marketing those dances. Considering what we've talked about, moving into the virtual world, actually seeing that wonderful crossover of the virtual world coming back into real world. It's a bit like snow crash where the computer suddenly manages to filter through the virus, wasn't it? Filtered it from the computer into real life. Yeah. We, if you think what a meme is, it is a kind of mental virus. It doesn't have to be evil. Not all viruses are bad. So Fortnite is actually no worse than any other games. In fact, in many ways it's very cartoony. The depiction of violence. You're not seeing people's brains splattered all over a wall. It's not one of those type of games. What we did to give back a little was we've got PS four and we took it down to the secondhand PS4 shop and she bought the, her first proper computer games. You know, she'd used Minecraft and Lego, but she'd never used those realistic ones. So we got the right age for her and she started playing it. One of them is fantasy, but you hunt, you're a warrior girl and you can do nice things and as tribes and it's so realistic. It's like a film and the problem solving and the challenge, cause she doesn't like watching videos. She, she likes playing games. And so actually she's gone instead of fortnight. She's gone to this beautiful, I've got to say, having not into games myself. [inaudible] yes, yes. Yeah. Flight Atlanta, it's called horizon new dorm. It's a phenomenal game, problem solving and as these tribes and the outcasts and what they do and how they learn those machines everywhere and you're going to learn why beautiful, realistic games, you'd love it. It's one of the best Saifai stories and that's quite exciting and she's really enjoying it. But it's interesting to hear what you're about for it now. She said, when will you trust me enough to play it? And I said, we will get there. It's just you are very under age and I need to be sure and she's been okay about that. And I think that I will work with her towards going, okay, well you might be able to have it a little bit and see how it goes. So working with her and finding something that we weren't worried about but she would still be into was a good solution. And with this game, live streaming games, she's not speaking to other people, but she is getting that need met and doing something. But I do think to start to learn to play these games where you are in groups and how that works and how you behave is something that children are going to need to do, but the live streaming can be scary because that's where people can be really rude and hurtful or say things and you've just got to be careful that if you are letting your child play these games really under age, the live streaming games or the live play games, your children or anyone's children will have to learn those things as they get older and I think the main thing for a parent is to introduce them to them in a steady way, but not prevent them from doing it because that's detrimental in reality. You're basically saying, I don't think you're responsible enough and actually what you need to teach them is be responsible on the internet. Now obviously a lot of Fortnite tick tock stuff is social engineering that's learning about you by asking you very specific questions that don't seem to be dangerous, but actually you're revealing stuff about you quite a lot. Things like, Oh, where did you go? At the weekend. Then I tried to take all right, I'm not telling them where I live. My youngest again plays African life, which I think is quite old and she chats to people all the time and I have to ask her constantly what she's saying to them to make sure that it's very vanilla and understanding location rock kids, if you don't know them, just assume there are assholes now. They might not be and you meet some great friends on the internet. I said I've met some great friends on the internet but take time and make sure they are decent people and they're not asking for anything and they're not looking for anything. Think about what you are posting if you are using tech talk or WhatsApp or Instagram because those pictures can stay there forever and so you need to think there's an app called BBC own it, keyboard and basically if you're going to type something nasty into social media, it goes, really, do you really want to say that? And it doesn't stop me doing it. It just tells you to think about it before you post it, which I don't have, but I thought it was quite clever. If you're worried about how children are treating other people and their friends and trying to be a bit cool or a bit sassy of really, you really want to say that and I think if you get someone to stop and just question what it is that they're shoving out there because it's so anonymous putting out there as well. It's like you can't see all these people, so I don't really care that there's this picture of me doing this because I can't see it. But actually it's the other way around, isn't it? But actually they know themselves. What you want them to do is to be able to make those mistakes in a fairly safe way to be able to talk to you about any mistake that they make. If I had gone to, and you don't post stuff about him [inaudible] all you're absent dad, what does he know about the internet? He's 50 I think an understanding of devices and what their capabilities are. So Albert is on an intend those squares. Yeah, that's a very limited system. There's a very limited amount of games you can get on that. Can't be loading GTA on it. It's not that sort of platform. So it's fine for a 10 year old. It's not cheap, but it's fine. They can play breath of the wild. They can play Zelda, they can play for night against people along PlayStations or computers because it all has cross play now. So in many ways that's a great platform for him. Although hasn't X-Box, that's a great platform for him. It's more advanced, it has more social functions, it's more able to do stuff, has YouTube on it, and then Blake plays on the computer on a PC now that's fully open. And where's the PS4 sit in that? I would say a PS four is slightly older than an X box. The games tend to be slightly more adult. There is a hierarchy of devices. You can go from an iPad when they first start, that's all locked down and you can lock down in [inaudible]. Yeah. And you can do family sharing and you can say, right, I have to approve. And the thing that you load onto it. Yeah, that's what I would do for a young child. There's other things isn't there. And WhatsApp groups, this might be more of a girl thing. If you've got lots and lots of people on a WhatsApp group and you can see them all chatting and having fun and some sort and allowed their phones in their bedrooms at night and there's things going, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing. That is not healthy a feel. You're missing out. You want to join in. So the only rule I have that calling to my children, very few other parents have, we have no screens in bedrooms. Yeah, no screens after supper or bedroom. Well, I'm not funny about the timing because if there's nothing else to do, my attitude is if I don't want them on a screen, then it's incumbent on me to say, well, let's go do something. Not just to say get off the screen and be bored. Because I was bored when I was a kid, but no screens in private rooms. And then they go off in the morning and in my house we have a rule they need to be up, they need to be dressed, they need to have that breakfast before they pick up a screen. So I set very simple boundaries but then I'm enforced them strictly and they will learn and the importance is keeping dialogue, a channel of conversation. It's taking the time to be interested in what they're doing as opposed to trying to shut it down. And there are places to go and look. There's internet matters.org there's think, you know.co.uk. It's ask about games.com Neta where the interesting one for me is the age restriction because there are games for 10 you know roadblocks is seven plus YouTube kids. There are games for young children but they just, I feel that it's too young for them. When my kids were young, they used to play a game. Do you remember that sort of stick man animation of a Ninja man wearing like sort of stick man's shooting game and it had an 18 rating on it and it was just like for what? Because it's shooting representations of humans and you're like, that is exactly why the internet is so broken is because it's regulated by people who don't understand the nuances of the internet. That's clearly not a game that would incite anything. A bunch of stick men running around shooting square red blocks each other is not inciting violence in any way. We are going to have to stop any man out, but I do just want to ask, how do you deal with in app purchases? Are you use go Henry are the prepaid cards exist but they get their pocket money on go Henry. And if they want to spend it all on that pack of gems and then next week another skin comes out, that's up to them. But then when they want to buy a hoodie, they don't have any money. That's their problem. And so what I'm trying to teach them is an understanding of money consequences. Cause I wish I had learned money management when I was a kid. Yeah, it is important. I agree. And my middle son got into some game and he said that, can you just put a block on my card on my card because I can't stop spending the money. I don't want to spend it. That's very grown up and responsible. That's what we are hoping for. Yeah. Just using your brain and that's what we need to give them the safe environment. They're learning from it and help them to get it right and be strong and be careful themselves. Yeah. As a parent, what you are is a safety net, not a control structure because I think there's this ridiculous level of control over our children and I think it makes our children feel very powerless in this world. That's a very good point to end on. We are going to have to go as we've really gone over this week. Look forward. Speak to you next week. Okay. Brilliant. See, that's right. Right.

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.