Get Cyber Safe — Let’s Be Careful Out There!
I participated in this Cyber Safe campaign on behalf of Mom Central Consulting for Boys & Girls Clubs of America. I received a promotional item as a thank you for participating.
Click on the banner above to take the Cyber Survivor Challenge!
Cyber Safe Futures for all!
Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) in partnership with Sprint has developed Cyber Safe Futures to give youth and parents tips and tools to safely navigate an ever-expanding online world. It’s BGCA’s goal for every young person to have a cyber safe future.
Children will be children, teens will be teens, and boys will be boys. When my kids were growing up, each of them tested the limits on the internet from porn to inappropriate contact with girls to lack of privacy controls to poor choices of games and music. Do you have that problem too?
I took the Cyber safety quiz, and I scored 5 out of 7. Even with 4 grown children (24, 23, 22, and 20) who all went through the ramping up of the internet, I still have more to learn and awareness to build. During the course of raising my kids, especially the three boys who were heavy into gaming, I developed a few tips which you might find helpful. I also added tips from Cyber Safe Futures, as even an old dog can learn some new cyber tips!!
Top Ten Tips to help your family be Cyber Safe
- Make sure you “Friend” your children on social networks. Also, know their passwords.
- Be a Cyber Smart parent and help your children be Cyber Safe, hit all these important areas:
- cyberbullying
- online privacy
- social networking
- mobile smarts
- Keep talking! New Cyber Safe issues come up frequently. Renew and review often with regular conversations
- Google your child’s name often. Set privacy controls!
- Check your child’s phone. Before you give your child their first phone, let them know you will check it periodically.
- Set privacy controls on Facebook tightly.
- 13 is Facebook’s minimum age. Don’t cave in and let a young child start social networking too soon.
- Stay informed. You can’t keep your kids Cyber Safe if you aren’t Cyber Aware! I was surprised to learn that one in three parents believe their teens to be much more tech-savvy than they are.
- Computers remain in public sight. In our house, the kids shared one computer until they were over 17. It stayed in the dining room, facing out so a parent or brother and sister walking by could see it. Files were checked regularly, poor choices were deleted, and suspensions resulted often!
- Phones stay on the kitchen counter at night. Establish a family charging center in a public area. Determine a time of night, where surfing and texting stops. I didn’t do this with my children as smart phones were just becoming mainstream as my kids were leaving high school. I sure would do this now!
What is your family doing to ensure they are CYBER SAFE?
Watch this informative video by the BGCA to see how much you know about Cyberbullying! Then head over to Cyber Safe Futures to watch other videos about online privacy, mobile smarts and social networking.
Great information to know.
Great tips! I’ll have to forward this to my friends/family.
These are such great tips!! I fear for when my son is older and able to go online!! Its super scary how much kids have access too and who has access to them!! Terrifying!! I plan on being the overprotective mom when it comes to the internet but you truly have to be!!
I am going to pass this information on to my daughter. I especially like the rule that all cell phones are put in a specially designated place for the evening. Great tip.
Thank you for all the good information. I need to pass this on to my children. I need my grandchildren to stay safe.
My son is only 5 but as he gets older I will be doing all the things you mentioned but as of now I make sure he is always in front of me when on the computer.
We put restrictions on apps and shows. Everything is password protected.
This may sound very prudish, but I don’t allow my kids to search on Google when I’m not sitting with her. There are just too many inappropriate sites that can pop up, her innocent eyes don’t need to see it!
I absolutely LOVE these tips!! Brilliant! We are pretty cyber safe with our kids, because they are still really young and aren’t allowed to do a lot online yet. But We have plans in place that coincide with your tips to help them be safe even as they get older. Love this post!
This is a great initiative, and I don’t want to sound ageist, but the elderly need a reminder of these tips as much as our children. My grandparents are constantly shipping their computer to my father after a virus meltdown or security breach. We, personally, have invested in great antivirus and phishing software, and only visit approved sites through McAffee. There are also NO social accounts for anyone under 18 in our household, and my friends practice the same general rule too.
Fortunately I have no children so I am spared many of these worries. We don’t surf much beyond basic sites and our passwords are alphanumeric and we change them regulary.
We don’t have kids, so really, we don’t do much at all. In fact, hubs and I have our own computers and rarely use them at home. Mostly, we are online at work, so there are rules we both abide by there that align quite a bit with what you posted above.
I do like the idea of a family charging station, but my phone is my alarm clock and hubs has his own business. Plus our cell phones are our only phones, so in an emergency, being by the bed is better.
I use apps that block inappropriate tracking to keep our privacy
luckily my little guy can’t surf the web yet, but we do limit his online video watching activity hehe 🙂
xo,
Sandy
Well…I try to encourage my teenagers to not do anything “stupid.” I do try to monitor their behavior as best I can but when I see something I don’t necessarily “like,” I screenshot and show it to their older brothers, who will “deal” with it, as they’re 19 and 21. It’s really tough, because tech-savvy kids can get around monitoring and controls and whatnot. It’s really a full-time job. Ugh.
im so glad my daughter isnt old enough to be on the computer yet! I will have to make sure when she is to take all the precautions and follow your awesome 10 tips!