Screen Smarts 101: Key Skills to Build Online Safety and Resilience

Many parents give young kids open access to technology, then feel betrayed when something goes wrong, says Pamela Wisniewski, PhD, Principal Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). However, online safety isn’t necessarily a matter of trust but a learned skill, she says. Nobody would hand a 16-year-old the car keys without driving lessons, then blame them for a wreck. Starting with protective settings while kids are younger teaches them the skills to stay safe later.

When kids set up a social media account for the first time, give them practical advice and work with them to choose the most protective privacy settings instead of just telling them not to put anything online, she suggests.  

Basic privacy strategies for social media first-timers include:

• • Making their profile “friends only,” so that their posts are not available publicly
  • Only allowing social media friends to be people they know in real life
  • Being careful about including personally-identifying information on posts
  • Turning off geotagging on photos so people won’t know where they live, play, or go to school
  • Avoiding live “check-ins” on social platforms so strangers can’t find them in physical spaces

(Wisniewski)

Many apps, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, now have stricter default settings for younger teens, usually those between 13 and 15 or 16, says Matthew Johnson, Director of Education, MediaSmarts. However, these settings only kick in if your child has given their correct age to the platform, he notes.

It’s unfortunately a common practice that children create social media accounts at ages before the platform allows – for example, most social media platforms require a user to be 13 years old to have their own account and many children start social media use well before this age. Correctly inputting age is important for ensuring the platform protections for young teen users are being applied, and is one reason why parents should make sure kids are waiting until age 13 to set up and own social media accounts that are theirs alone, says Johnson.

Kids need to know “there are bad actors online that can perpetrate bullying or cyber grooming,” says Wisniewski. Talk with them about trust online and who they should be talking to, and remind them to only accept friend requests from people they know in real life. 

Instead of reviewing every message your teen sends and receives, look over their follower list together and ask, “Is this somebody you know and trust?” Turning it into a conversation helps teens make healthy decisions for themselves, and keeps the focus on trust rather than making oversharing feel like a personal failure, she says.

Privacy isn’t just about what content teens post online, says Wisniewski. Understanding online privacy is also about:

• • What data platforms are collecting about and using to feed algorithms
  • How platforms are combining information collected from their own site as well as other online sources to target a profile for problematic content or marketing
  • Other people sharing information about them publicly that they don’t want shared 

(Wisniewski)

Help teens see their privacy “as a relational and interpersonal process rather than just a binary process of ‘share or not share,’” suggests Wisniewski.

Just one in five young people understands that their feeds and search results are shaped by a profile the platform has built about them, says Johnson.

Every major social media platform uses one or more algorithms to decide what to recommend based on what it learns about you. When someone first signs up, feeds like TikTok’s For You page or Instagram Reels start with what’s new and popular, then narrow in fast based on how the person engages. This can happen in a matter of minutes with a new account, says Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Connecticut.

The exact formulas aren’t public and change quickly, but information about almost all behavior on social platforms, even if brief, is collected to inform the algorithms. These can include: 

• • Liking, sharing, or reacting to content
  • Watch time – even if only pausing on a video for milliseconds
  • Biographic and demographic information
  • Information from your device, other apps, and other sites you have visited

(Oeldorf-Hirsch)

To understand why feeds show what they do, it helps to know the “three A’s” of social media platforms, says Imran Ahmed, MA, CEO, Center for Countering Digital Hate:

• • Advertising. Social media platforms make all of their money from advertising, and they earn more the longer people stay on the platform, since they can show an ad every few posts.
  • Abundant Content. Platforms have far more content than anyone could ever watch. On TikTok alone, 13 years’ worth of content is uploaded every single day.
  • Algorithms. Algorithms decide which content gets shown to lots of people and which gets pushed aside. To make as much advertising money as possible, “their algorithms need to addict people for as long as possible.” 

(Ahmed) 

The feed is serving up content it thinks you want, but its ultimate goal is to keep users engaged with the platform. The economic motivations behind this goal affect how kids find factual information. If someone is looking for health information, for example, the platform has no economic interest in helping them find it quickly, says Ahmed. Instead, the platform may “present you with two different versions or 10 different versions of the truth and let you work it out for yourself,” he says.

Today’s teens likely have more awareness of algorithms than adults do, says Oeldorf-Hirsch. Still, there are important critical skills we can teach teens to question and evaluate the algorithm behavior and how it makes them feel or behave, she says. These include:

• • Critical evaluation of what shows up in their social media feed and asking, “Why did I get this? Is this actually relevant to me?” 
  • Noticing whether the feed shows only content aimed at them instead of a full range of views and information
  • Coping skills to step away and take a break if the feed is serving content that negatively affects their mood or health, or taking steps to “retrain” or shift the feed toward more or less of certain types of content 

(Oeldorf-Hirsch) 

In her research with adults, those who better understood how algorithms work and why they show certain content were more likely to take counteractive steps, like trying to break out of the algorithm and questioning what they are shown, says Oeldorf-Hirsch. They understood that a post appearing in their feed means the algorithm thinks it is relevant to them, and doesn’t automatically make it credible, she says.

With so much information online, and ever more convincing false content made with AI, no one has the time or mental bandwidth to closely read every post, image, or video, says Johnson. At any age, most of us rely on heuristics, or “thinking shortcuts,” to decide whether something is true or reliable. Teaching kids to use better thinking shortcuts is a critical step to help them effectively sift through online content, he says. 

The best thinking shortcut to develop when evaluating online content  is “information sorting,” a quick way to tell whether a source is worth our attention before giving it a close read, says Johnson.  Effective information sorting involves: 

• • Deciding whether factual accuracy matters to that type of content (an ad or meme are an example of content where the content isn’t claiming accuracy)
  • Verifying a source before closely reading its content. If the content makes a factual claim, do “companion reading” – utilize search engines, encyclopedias, and other sources already known to be  reliable to check whether a new source can be trusted. 
  • Only closely read fact-based text that has passed the companion reading test. 

(Johnson) 

Verifying sources first matters, because unreliable sources often look like reliable ones in the way they are written, says Johnson. This approach also puts tools kids already use, like search engines and Wikipedia, to good use while teaching them to use those tools well, he says.

Note: See the special section  at the bottom of this page for a step-by-step guide to information sorting.

Simply telling kids to “question everything” is not only unhelpful, but can backfire by making them cynical instead of skeptical, says Johnson. Instead of framing having screen smarts as being sophisticated or savvy, parents and educators should instead  frame the process as making us more aware of our own limitations, and more intellectually humble, he says. Intellectual humility means being:

• • Open-minded: willing to change your beliefs when you see new evidence
  • Curious: actively looking for new information, even if it challenges what you think or believe
  • Realistic: understanding the flaws and limits of your own thinking
  • Teachable: willing to accept that other people know more than you on some topics 

(Johnson)

One way to practice intellectual humility is to ask three questions before reading or deeply engaging with online content:

1. 1. What do I already think or believe about this?
   2. Why might I want to believe or disprove this? (We’re often less skeptical of things we want to be true, and more skeptical of things we don’t.)
   3. What would make me change my mind? 

(Johnson)

Parents and teachers can model this by talking openly about issues they’ve changed their minds about. “Modeling the idea that we change our views in response to new information is one of the most important parts of fostering digital media literacy,” says Johnson.

Fact-checking online claims may sound time-consuming and intimidating, but there are several reputable free online tools available to quickly determine whether a factual claim has already been confirmed or debunked, says Johnson. A single search with a fact-checker may be all it takes to determine whether a source is reliable or not. MediaSmarts provides a free search tool that can check several leading fact-checking sites at once, including Snopes, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and AP Fact Check.

However, it’s important to remind kids that a claim isn’t necessarily true just because no one has fact-checked it yet. Fact checkers can’t cover every story, and they need time to do their work, according to MediaSmarts. If nothing comes up in a fact-checking search, the next step is finding the original source or comparing with other reliable sources.

AI is built into tools kids use every day, like voice assistants and the algorithms behind their feeds, often in ways that are nearly invisible, says Diana Graber, Founder, Cyber Civics and Cyberwise, and author of Raising Humans in a Digital World. With so many apps and platforms, keeping kids away from AI entirely isn’t realistic, but parents can give them the thinking skills and internet “street smarts” to navigate it, says Torney.

Parents and educators can start teaching AI literacy as early as kindergarten, beginning with “the idea that these are machines, not people, that they behave differently,” says Torney. AI chatbots work by predicting the most likely next word, so they can confidently state false things and don’t have real judgment, he says. A parrot can be a helpful example for children, he suggests: “Parrots don’t really understand what they’re producing, AI systems don’t really understand what they’re producing,” he says.

Most teens already use AI regularly, and for many different reasons. Yet 58% of parents know little to nothing about the AI safety features in the products their teens use, says Torney. You don’t need to be a tech expert to talk with kids about AI in a curious way that builds connection and understanding. Ask your kids, “How are you using it? How are your friends using it?” suggests Torney. The goal is not to be accusatory, but to approach your discussions with older youth from a place of curiosity, he notes. Try a major chatbot yourself, or ask your child to show you the tools they use and what they like about them.

Help older kids tell the difference between using AI as an assistant and AI as a shortcut, and between AI as a tool and AI as a confidant or relationship support, suggests Torney.

After asking how your kids are using AI, sit down with them and teach some “prompt literacy,” says Wisniewski. There’s a big difference between asking a chatbot to write an essay or answer a question for you, and saying, “here’s a paragraph I wrote, please tell me some ways that I can improve it.” Using a chatbot together lets parents show kids different ways to interact with it, she says.

Independent risk assessments of AI chatbots and tools used by kids, teens, and schools have found risks ranging from mental health and privacy to overdependence, manipulation, and weaker critical thinking, says Torney. At the root of many of these risks, “these products weren’t really designed with kids in mind, and yet kids and teens are using them,” he says.

Look into which platforms your kids are on (Common Sense Media’s AI ratings at commonsense.org can help), and set family agreements about AI use. For example, “in this house, we use AI for homework help, not for relationship advice. We use AI in public spaces, not in our bedrooms,” he suggests. Watch for signs of overreliance or emotional attachment, such as pulling away from activities or relationships they used to enjoy.

Scammers can now clone someone’s voice from just 15 to 30 seconds of audio, and they are already using cloned voices to call people while pretending to be their relatives, says Sonia Tiwari, PhD, Director of Research at Oki Pie Lab, and children’s media and AI design researcher. An adult may notice when a call doesn’t sound like their loved one, but kids often don’t have that kind of awareness. “They can be duped by a deep fake of their family member, visual or audio,” she says.

According to the National Cybersecurity Alliance, one plan to protect children from these types of deep fakes is to create a family safe word: “a pre-agreed code word or phrase only you and your trusted group know.” If a child gets an urgent call or message that seems to come from a family member, asking for the safe word is a quick way to check who is really on the other end. Choose something an outsider couldn’t easily guess (not a birthday or pet’s name), and practice it now and then so everyone remembers to use it.

Strict parental controls without a collaborative, trust-based approach don’t necessarily mean more safety for kids, says Wisniewski. Instead, they often lead to secrecy, workarounds, and conflict within families, and can discourage the development of the skills needed to keep themselves safe and aware.

Building teens’ skills step by step so they can do more on social media over time supports their independence and ability to cope with risk. Skills like how to block and report, or what to share and what not to share, are learned skills that we need to be teaching over time, says Wisniewski.

Parental controls are not a reliable stand-alone solution for keeping kids safe online. Their real value is in prompting ongoing conversation between parents and children, says Adam Pletter, PsyD, child and adolescent psychologist and founder of iParent101.com. Build them into your family media plan, test them together, involve your child in evaluating what works, and gradually expand access as your child demonstrates readiness and responsibility.

Parent use of control software can also send mixed messages. It’s difficult to encourage teens to care about privacy and at the same time use apps that track every text they send or their exact location. The more parents get teens’ buy-in on the healthy screen-smart habits they want to build, the better, says Wisniewski.

Make it common to talk about the “why” of online behavior with children, suggests Sherri Hope Culver, Director of the Center for Media and Information Literacy and professor at Temple University. Not just why they can’t go to a site, but also why they might want to, or why a site may have restrictions, she says. Establishing the family position on why or when something might be inappropriate or okay, long before a hard decision has to be made, will help train the child early to understand your approach and also to consider for themselves what might be healthy for them.

For more specific tips on parenting for online safety, view Children and Screens’ “Online Safety for Youth” tip sheet.

Helping kids to develop their own awareness of how certain uses of media are making them feel has been the most impactful aspect of her work with youth, says Culver, and yet it is the question that adults least often bring up with them. “If we ask them how it makes them feel, and it doesn’t make them feel good, then you have a place to go to talk about ‘What parts of it are making you feel better?’, ‘What parts of it are not making you feel as good? How do we navigate that? How do we change what we’re doing so you actually feel better about it?’”

Some parents ease kids into social media by installing a new app only on the parent’s own device at first, so they can watch over those early interactions. Once kids show they’ve learned good digital safety and citizenship practices, the app can move to the child’s own device, says Wisniewski. The key is not loosening up access until some competency has been learned, she says.

Revisiting settings works best as an ongoing conversation. Household rules have the most impact when they are treated as the beginning of a conversation, rather than the end of one, and when the purpose of the rules is to increase kids’ independence, says Johnson. Before giving more independence, he suggests asking: Are they already following the rules you’ve established? Do you feel they’ve internalized those rules? Are they ready for that degree of independence?

Start early by talking with kids about where they get their information, says Johnson. Whatever they’re into, whether it’s dinosaurs or video games, when they share something they learned, tell them it’s great to hear it, then ask where they heard it. From there, think it through together: Why might this be a reliable source? Or why might we want to be skeptical, or look for another source to confirm or contradict it?

Kids and adults alike can benefit from talking about how their technology and social media use makes them feel – as well as whether it aligns with their deeper core values, says Sophia Choukas-Bradley, PhD, Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh, Department of Psychology. By asking honest questions to themselves about their own media use, “most adolescents and adults realize that they use social media in ways that are fun in the moment, but cause stress and don’t give lasting happiness.”

Kids also notice how adults use technology – and whether it matches the family rules and values. Research shows young people are just as critical of adults’ tech use as adults often are of kids’, says Johnson. “The message that we send through what we do is more powerful than anything we can say,” he says. Household rules about healthy and “screen smart” device use should apply to parents too. If the rule is no devices at the dinner table, follow it yourself, and if you need to make an exception, explain why so kids can see it still fits the values behind the rule, he says. 

“There is nothing as good as role modeling for the kids,” says Ran Barzilay, MD, PhD, Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist, Youth Suicide Prevention, Intervention and Research Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. When a kid sees their parents put their phones aside at bedtime or during family dinner, that will go a long way towards encouraging similar behavior by the child, he says.

When thinking of a child’s “tech diet,” parents should help adolescents learn to balance the “high-dopamine” activities that act like “junk food” with screen activities that release other more beneficial neurotransmitters, such as endorphins through self-care, oxytocin through positive social connection or community building, and serotonin through learning, play, and creativity, says Shimi Kang, MD, FRCPC, Clinical Associate Professor at The University of British Columbia and author of The Tech Solution.

Examples of this include using screensavers of nature, listening to waves or bird sounds, and using apps for problem-solving, breathing exercises, or mindfulness. “Wire and fire” this healthy use of tech so that young people start associating tech use with something that is serving them for their benefit, health, or social connectivity, says Kang.

“Nobody goes online to be more private,” says Wisniewski. Youth go online for information, resources, support, connection, and civic engagement. The goal is to help them develop skills to protect their privacy and mental health while still reaching those positive goals.

Help adolescents focus on social media features that support real connection safely, like private messaging with friends or learning about communities they want to be part of, rather than feeds like the For You page that serve up algorithm-generated content tied to social comparison, suggests Oeldorf-Hirsch.

Experts agree: one of the healthiest habits to develop around screen use is to keep digital media devices out of children’s bedrooms at night.

When phones are taken out of kids’ bedrooms, kids sleep more, says Lauren Hale, PhD, Professor of Family, Population, and Preventive Medicine, Stony Brook University. Time on a screen is time kids aren’t winding down or sleeping, and content like social media can be stimulating enough to keep them feeling anxious or turning things over in their minds. Phones also interrupt sleep during the night: more than 35% of kids say they wake up to check their phone, whether it buzzes or they just don’t want to miss anything, according to a Common Sense Media survey. 

“The easiest thing to say here is make and enforce a policy to keep screens out of the bedroom,” says Hale. The next step is harder, but just as important: “model it yourself,” she says.

Many of the skills kids need to navigate their online world are linked, says Oeldorf-Hirsch. Algorithms are part of social media, and they also surface AI-generated content. Sit down with your child and look through their privacy settings together. Scroll through their feed and ask, “Do you know why this is coming up?” or “Is this something you follow, or is this something that was recommended to you?”

Most teens already actively manage the risks they run into online on their own, and some risk is a natural, developmentally appropriate part of growing up, says Wisniewski. “We have to teach teens practical ways to protect themselves in a risk-based environment,” she says. “Shielding them doesn’t empower them or teach them how to protect themselves online.”

Teens often treat privacy as a learning process. They may share something sensitive, then take steps to fix it once a risky interaction makes the consequences feel real. Resilience plays a key role in adolescent online safety, says Wisniewski. Even teens who claimed to have faced a lot of risk online reported fewer negative effects when they felt they had the inner resilience to overcome those experiences, and they built that resilience by working through risk as a learning process.

Conversations that build resilience go beyond “don’t.” Wisniewski compares it to how many parents talk about sex: share your values, but also teach protection. In the same way, parents can tell teens not to share intimate photos online, but also give them key information in case they decide to do that, such as never showing their face in such photos, she says. Most important, be open so teens can come to you with questions “instead of feeling like they’re deviant or going to be shamed,” she says.

Whatever your family’s rules, rule number one should be that if kids ever have a problem with their online life, “however small, however big, they should come to you,” says Johnson. That means agreeing as a parent not to freak out, overreact, or immediately take away the device, platform, or app as a first response. Some consequences may be appropriate once things settle, but your first reaction should be to stay calm and work on fixing the problem together. “If you overreact, they’re not going to come to you a second time,” he says. 

Parents are often unaware of the risks their teens run into online, and many respond with punishment even when the teen wasn’t the one who did something wrong, according to a two-month diary study of parents and teens, says Wisniewski. Teens say that when parents take a punishment-based approach, they stop going to their parents for help. Work with your teen instead of against them, she says.

Being online gives kids chances to practice empathy and look out for their peers, says Graber. Parents can’t and won’t be there every time something bad happens. Teach your child how to be an “up-stander”: when they see another child who needs help, they can step in to offer comfort or take it to a trusted adult. “We should teach our kids how to look out for each other,” she says.