Cybersafety for your Kids: are you a Controller or a Mentor?
If your children are in the Social Media age chances are you feel they’re in great danger.. .and probably they are…
Cyberbullying is a hard beast and quite impossible to defeat.
I know how you feel, for I work with teens and their families since 2000, and I see their worries.
Maybe they are your worries too.
And I know you’re a good parent caring for your children, so your very question is: How can I protect my sons and my daughters from online harassment?
Then you see they have their accounts and their passwords, and you suppose you don’t know them all.
You’re right.
Probably they have an online activity they don’t tell you.
It’s normal, it’s the age: they are building the autonomy they need to walk their Life.
How can you deal with Cyberbullying with so much secrecy?
Maybe you’re doing a usual mistake: you feel the need to get more and more in control over your children online activity.
So you ask for passwords and periodically take their smartphones in order to check their Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc…
Then something strange happens: you see your children more and more resistants, they often get upset, they build a barrier against you.
And the more the barrier arises, the more you feel the need to strengthen your control over them.
Do you see the issue?
While you are sincerely careful of them, you are untrustful and dictatorial at their eyes.
There is another way to protect your children from online harassment.
It’s called Mentoring.
How do you shift from Controlling to Mentoring?
Inner steps:
- understand your children and you are not enemies: you are allied against the fight for Cyberbullying and to find a way to stay protected
- understand your children are more mature than you think, and they have their own intelligence though it’s still young and lack of experiences
- understand you will have to let them go, sooner or later, and that while they grow they build their own private spaces where you are not allowed to enter…and it’s ok with it!
When you really understand these principles, you are ready to transfer this mood to you children.
Technical steps:
this is where a Parental Control Software comes in handy, if not required.
You don’t use it to control your children online activity: you use it to monitor and to start a conversation if you see some serious and real danger.
You need to understand your children’s World in order to discern serious dangers from teens gossips.
A Professional Counseling may be of great help in order not to make mistakes.
You must pay attention to the Parental Control Software you choose:
- it allows you to monitor your children online activity on remote so that you don’t need to take their device on your hand (a move that may be perceived as too much intrusive)
- it allows you to monitor every features of all of their devices (SMS, instant messaging apps, social platforms, etc…: teens use many channels at the same time to stay connected with their friends, so you need a global vision of them)
- it allows you do your monitoring without asking your children for their passwords (another move that is perceived as very intrusive, for our children are very sensitive about privacy)
- it allows you to set up a notification system so that you are alerted only of serious threats
Relationship steps:
you want to avoid to install a monitoring software on their device and start monitoring without your children approval.
Relationship is the key here:
- ask them if they ever received harmful messages, or if some of their friends have ever been victim of online harmful activity
- don’t propose a Parental Control Software: let them express their feelings, fears, and doubts so that you can “suggest” it
- be clear that you’ll never monitor their usual activity: you set a notification alert so that you intervene only if a serious threat occurs
They are just examples: the key here is to negotiate and discuss the rules with your children.
You want the rules to be negotiated and agreed by both of you and find a common ground.
You need a real common ground for both of you will stick to the rules once they are set up, and you won’t change them without another negotiation.
All of this may seem too tricky, but believe me: when you really understand all of this, the next steps are much easier.
And remember Parenting is a never-ending job…
