Educating parents about online harms

What can teachers do to help inform parents and carers about the latest risks and online harms? Mubina Asaria, online safeguarding consultant at LGfL-The National Grid for Learning, shares some advice

Many teachers comment on the difficulties they face trying to engage parents in conversations about online safety, but with 7-16 year-olds spending an average of four hours a day online, parents can be the key to keeping their children safe. So what can teachers do to help inform parents and carers about the latest risks and online harms; what their children may have access to; and what they need to be aware of? What strategies can we provide to equip parents to talk to their children about staying safe online?
    
Ultimately it all comes down to communication. With this in mind, and using the latest information and statistics from Ofcom’s Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes 2023, and Revealing Reality’s Anti-social Media Report 2023, LGfL has put together a ‘free’ ready-to-use PowerPoint, ‘My child’s life online – parent discussion activities using Ofcom statistics’. It’s packed full of helpful advice and resources for parent information sessions and online safety workshops, to build their skills and confidence to open this dialogue with their children.  
    
An effective way to introduce the subject to parents is to ask how much they know about their child’s life online. Parents are usually familiar with some of the apps their children use, but not necessarily how long they spend on them. The latest statistics on the use of social media apps are guaranteed to fix parental attention and kickstart discussion.
   
Many parents will be surprised to learn YouTube is the most popular site or app with children aged 3 to 17 – 96 per cent watch videos online –  followed by TikTok, Snapchat and WhatsApp. They may be aware of age restrictions – but the latest statistics from Ofcom, showed although 84 per cent of parents knew about age restrictions, only 37 per cent knew the  minimum age was 13.  
    
A quarter of the 17 per cent of three to four year olds who have their own mobile phone use WhatsApp. Children aged three to seven, typically use WhatsApp and FaceTime for sending messages or making calls. The majority of eight to eleven year olds have profiles on TikTok, followed by WhatsApp, YouTube and Snapchat. By 11-12 years old, 97 per cent of children have their own social media profile, with almost universal rates of mobile phone ownership for children moving from primary to secondary school.

Starting the conversation
Ask parents if they talk to their children about the sites they use, and what they share. What are their children watching in their rooms, or on their devices at night? Parental supervision typically declines as children get older and are at greater risk of online harm; less than half of parents directly supervised their child’s activity between the ages of five to seven, with this figure falling to 22 per cent as they reached transition.
    
But what about social media and how children are using it? Most parents believe that apps like Snapchat are just fun, but as with all apps, and especially those with disappearing messages, there can be a far darker more dangerous side. Revealing Reality’s latest report – ‘Anti-social media: What some vulnerable children are seeing on SnapChat’, explores the  harmful content available, and  firsthand experiences from children and young people across Britain.
    
Their accounts are shocking, with young people reporting they routinely view videos of illegal activity – fights, beatings, stabbings, sexual assaults, raids, sex acts involving children and the sale of weapons and drugs online. Some see this type of content so regularly it becomes normalised – one young child refers to the posts as ‘the Evening News’.
    
They are not viewing this content on the dark web, it is right there on mainstream social media and messaging platforms. It’s not about ‘good apps’ and ‘bad apps’, but the functionality which counts, and parental controls or lack thereof. Alarmingly, much of this content goes unreported – the majority of the children canvassed said that they ‘wouldn’t consider reporting inappropriate or violent content because they have seen what happens to ‘snitches’.  
    
Parents should also be made aware of the impact of accessing pornography on normalising unhealthy relationships. In particular the Children’s Commisioner’s ‘Evidence on pornography’s influence on harmful sexual behaviour among children’, which reveals that the average age that children first view pornography is 13, sometimes even younger, with many unwittingly accessing it on social media – 27 per cent by age 11 and 10 per cent by the age of nine – on platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram.
    
Gaming is another area where children and young people can inadvertently put themselves at risk. One of the most revealing and concerning gaming statistics in the Ofcom report is that 25 per cent of children played against someone they did not know previously, meeting them for the first time through the game, with 22 per cent of children also chatting to strangers.

Empowering parents
So how can we help empower parents to help safeguard their children at home? We can provide them with information, resources and strategies they can access themselves and share with their children.
    
LGfL’s ParentSafe site is a great source of information, both for staff-led presentations or to signpost parents to. It features a wide range of videos, the latest statistics, and activities such as story-time ideas, a digital family agreement, conversation starters and tips to reinforce key safety messages and establish shared expectations, with other links to resources from ParentZone, CEOP Education, Common Sense Media, Internet Matters and the NSPCC.
    
Talking to parents about parental controls and settings encourages them to make decisions about what their children can access.
    
With Ofcom highlighting that only 14 per cent of children have used the reporting flagging function to report threatening or inappropriate material, remind parents to talk to their children about the channels available; whether on the social media platform itself, or by talking to them or a trusted adult in school. And make sure your parents also know they can come and talk to you if they have concerns or are uncertain what to do.