‘You wouldn’t dream of not asking the name of a stranger they were talking to in the park’
PHILIP ARNEILL of CyberSafeKids on how to keep your child safe with their new gadget.
1. GAME CONSOLES
THERE are some technical restrictions where you can set it so you’re not actually playing against anybody else online – only against the computer. Or you can only be playing against people that you know in the offline world rather than people who are randomly on there, or people who are anonymous online.
Keep an eye on the chat groups and chat threads [within online gaming], because other players might not be who they say they are and can be anonymous. Sometimes the content of those chats and also sometimes images and things that are being shared are perhaps not what you want your child to be looking at.
So it’s a case of monitoring and supervision which just has to be done. Parents do feel overwhelmed, but the reality is that if you place your child in the same situation in the offline world, you would never dream of not checking who they were going to play with. So you’ve got to do the same monitoring in the online world because there are a lot of potential risks and harms of contact with strangers.
Spending limits would be another thing that we would encourage adults to talk with kids about. If you have your credit card hooked up to an account, children can potentially be buying things within games. We’ve had parents sometimes come to us thinking their bank account or credit card has been hacked, when in actual fact, the child – perhaps unknowingly – was just buying things. One parent had a bill of over €1,200.
2. WEB BROWSING (ON A SMARTPHONE, TABLET OR LAPTOP)
THERE are certain things you can do that help. You can use ‘safe search’ mode on browsers like Google [to filter out adult content]. Checking browser histories is another way to monitor use.
You can also set up your devices, particularly if you’re on the same platforms, using Google Families or Apple Family
Sharing. So, for example, if you and your children both have Apple devices, you have a master or parent device and the admin role.
Then on your device, you can see my device, my brother’s, my sister’s, and for each person you can look at how it’s being used – what apps are being accessed, how long they’re spending on them. And you can also set limits on those apps.
But our message to parents would be that using technical restrictions like filters is only one thing. If that’s your only solution, it’s not going to work, because kids are going to come across things one way or another, whether they’re looking for it deliberately or not. That’s just the nature of the internet. So it’s about ongoing discussion and monitoring.
3. SOCIAL MEDIA (ON A SMARTPHONE, TABLET OR LAPTOP)
THE first thing to remember is, social media is not designed for children, it’s designed for adults. The minimum age restriction for most apps is 13, so children below 13 just shouldn’t be on there – no discussion. And because the digital age of consent in Ireland is 16, they shouldn’t really be on there without parental supervision or at least knowledge between 13 and 16.
If we were following at least those basic fundamental principles, that’s one way that we could mitigate the current situation [where social media use has been linked with a range of mental health problems in young people].
Some of the content that children are coming across – and also some of the content that they’re maybe looking for and then is being fed to them over and over again through the algorithms – is not going to be healthy.
It wouldn’t be healthy for adults, never mind children and young people whose brains are still developing and are still in a more impulsive phase of their life and trying to figure out who they are.
Intervention and supervision are key, because we have found that a lot of things arise because they’re not addressed soon enough.
And in many cases, young people can be good at hiding things.
We would say certainly, from a physical and mental health point of view, a balanced use of social media and supervision and discussion with parents are to be encouraged.
And if the child is under 13, they just simply shouldn’t be on there. There should be some privacy and some independence given, but it’s got to be earned until you get to that digital age of consent.
4. VR HEADSETS
IF you think about something like the metaverse [a virtual space where users interact as computerised characters], there are risks in terms of talking to strangers. If you’re placing that into a virtual reality situation, it’s even more potentially harmful because, although you’re not actually having physical contact with the person, it is certainly much closer to it [in sensation].
We ask children in our surveys what devices they own and there is an increase in virtual reality headsets, and there’s likely to be a further increase.
The same rules apply in the sense of monitoring, checking in, and making sure they’re not overusing them.
One really basic thing that we would certainly encourage for younger children is that they use these devices you give them in public spaces – as in the kitchen and the living room – rather than up in their bedroom.
Then you can have at least one eye on what they’re doing and what they’re listening to or what’s popping up if it’s something like YouTube, as opposed to them just being squirrelled off on their own for hours with you not really knowing what they’re doing.