Teaching Kids Online Safety

[Dr. Pamela Wisniewski]: Online safety isn’t necessarily a matter of trust. Online safety is a learned skill that we need to think about how to teach our teens and our younger children to use the technology like a tool. As an example, nobody would give the 16-year-old teen the keys to their car without any driving lessons, and then they wouldn’t blame them if they got into a wreck without those lessons. Then, unfortunately, what many of us are doing as parents is that we’re giving our younger children these technologies and then feeling shocked or dismayed once it doesn’t turn out the way that we want. And so, again, we need to give teens the tools and teach them how to be safe online instead of using abstinence- and fear-based approaches to try to keep them safe.