Parenting Pointers: Teaching Your Child Digital Resilience

According to a report from the Pew Research Center, 92% of American teens go online at least once a day. Thanks to the near-ubiquity of smartphones, it’s almost impossible to keep kids, tweens, and young adults offline. Unfortunately, that means they’re potentially being exposed to a number of risk factors. Some teenagers even use the “deep web”--a term for hidden websites frequently offering illegal services--to purchase drugs.

Although you can set up filters to try and prevent your teens from accessing this content, you can’t control what they’ll do when they’re no longer living at home. As such, rather than focusing on keeping your children off risky websites, you’re better off teaching them the fundamentals of digital resilience.

Keeping Teens Safe on the Internet

The prevalence of cyberbullying indicates that peer pressure is right at home on the internet; teenagers won’t be able to avoid it forever. Digital resilience refers to their ability to handle the pressure of being online without falling prey to risky behavior. If teens learn to use the internet in a healthy and safe way early in their lives, they’ll be more likely to continue using it that way in adulthood.

As a parent, there are several ways you can instill this quality on your teenagers. They include:

• Monitoring Behavior: Again, while you can’t entirely prevent your teens from encountering dangerous content on the internet, you should still play an active role in limiting the amount of time they spend online. Restricting them from accessing certain websites, and monitoring their overall digital habits are a couple of ways to enforce this. Even something as innocuous as shopping online for comfortable boots can pose certain risks, as too much time doing so can lead to money mismanagement or addictive behavior.  Sometimes, teenagers merely need a role model to help them determine when the internet poses a risk to their health and wellbeing.
• Supplying Resources: While you can provide your teens with the foundation for positive internet use, they also need to develop their own safe browsing habits independently. Supply them with tools that help them keep track of how they use the internet. Once they’re taught healthy online habits by others via their own usage, teens can learn to self-monitor.
• Encouraging Positive Use: It’s not a bad idea to try and convince your teens to spend less time online. Of course, many parents know that this is far from an easy goal to achieve. Thankfully, there’s another option: Identifying positive ways that they use the internet, and encouraging those. For example, if your teen has a creative hobby, they might share their work online. Let your teen know you approve, instead of criticizing them for spending so much time online.
• Trusting Them: It’s easy to worry about how your kids will use the internet. That said, if you treat them as an adult who is capable of making their own choices, they’ll generally be less likely to rebel.

Striking the right balance between monitoring your teens and allowing them to use the internet as they see fit can be a difficult task. That’s why it’s important to use tools that bridge the gap between your restrictions and the freedom they’ll experience as adults. Instead of trying to keep them off risky websites forever, work with them to develop the traits of strong digital resilience. Doing so will help them use the internet in a positive way throughout their lives.

https://www.safetydetective.com/blog/antivirus-statistics/