GUIDE
"Not Just a Device" Empowering Your Child's Online Safety: A Guide for Parents on Digital Safety Skills with Insights from Children & Youth
This digital safety guide provides parents with guidance on empowering their children to navigate online environments safely. It emphasises the importance of parental involvement in their children's online lives, treating it like any other social environment. Insights from children and young people throughout the guide highlight the crucial role that parents and other adults play in educating children about digital safety and keeping them safe.
Digital safety skills can be compared to other safety skills such as teaching children traffic skills. No child ventures into traffic without first practising, for example, walking the school route together with an adult. Just like in any other social environment, the younger the child, the more they need an adult’s presence to stay safe. Older children and teenagers also still need parents’ support in certain situations.
The digital device acts as a gateway to a digital environment where children navigate and interact with other internet users. They are too often exposed to such social environment unsupervised. The key factor is not the amount of time spent online, but rather the experiences children have there, the activities and content they engage in, and the people they interact with.
This guide has been produced as a part of Project 2KNOW, a two-year project funded by the European Commission, dedicated to improving the ecosystem of prevention and response to online crimes of sexual violence against children.
Learn more about the project: