Do you know what your child is doing online? If recent research is accurate, there are plenty of us out there who don’t.
According to a recent report from online safety charity CyberSafeKids, 82 per cent of children aged between eight and 12 years of age are permitted to use phones and smart devices unsupervised in their bedrooms. The findings were published to coincide with Safer Internet Day earlier this week, and they make sobering reading.
The same report found 28 per cent of the children surveyed said they could go online whenever they wanted, giving them a concerning level of access and potential exposure to harmful content online. Screen time is also an issue, with 50 per cent saying they spend too much time online.
At the same time, only 35 per cent of children said their activity was visible to caregivers or parents.
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It happens more than we realise. Who hasn’t handed over a phone to a small child to watch videos online in a bid to get five minutes of uninterrupted time? Or set up an account to play a game online without thinking too closely about the potential repercussions?
The knee-jerk reaction would be to prevent children from accessing any online content. However, in an increasingly digitised world, that is becoming an increasingly unlikely solution.
There are ways to let your child have some digital experiences without opening them up to the internet’s weirder side.
Tap in to parental controls
Letting your young child loose on the internet unsupervised is a little like sending them out to play with the traffic on the road: it might be fine, but there is a high chance that they will wind up in a situation everyone will regret.
Even seemingly safe scenarios – online gaming, for example – can turn ugly. And besides, retaining some control over access until they can manage it appropriately for themselves is always a good idea.
Whether you are setting up an iPhone, an Android or a games console, there are ways to make sure your child isn’t accessing inappropriate content. Apple has its parental controls tucked away under Screen Time in the Settings menu, where you can set limits for categories of apps or choose each app individually.
A further step is the Communication Safety setting, which will detect nude photos and videos before they are sent or viewed on your child’s device. When activated, it will blur photos that are received and trigger a warning to the child, steering them to helpful resources.
For Google users, the Family Link app is there to allow you to monitor time spent online, and add restrictions and rules for accessing content and apps. The app is also available on iOS, so the entire family doesn’t need to be on the same platform.
Nintendo Switch has its own parental controls app, which allows you to set daily time limits for access to the hand-held console and the type of content it can access.
Sony and Microsoft also have parental controls built into their platforms to monitor gaming time.
Which brings us to ...
Create child profiles
Many of these parental controls will require two things: a child account and a parental account to manage it.
If you need to keep a close eye on what your child is doing online, setting up a child account on a phone, games console or other digital service is advisable.
You can always transition the account to a teenager or adult profile when the time comes, but not all services will allow you to go the other way.
It is a fairly straightforward procedure. Google and Apple, for example, will ask if you are setting up an account for yourself or your child during the set-up process.
Wifi routers can help
Your home wifi can be another way to control what is accessed on your home network, and at what time.
Setting a time when only your household devices – the video doorbell for example – can access the home wifi connection will keep your child from doomscrolling on Instagram until late into the night and ignoring the prompts to wind down and put the app into sleep mode.
Most wifi hubs have the admin password printed alongside the wifi network details on the back or underside of the device. However, you might want to change the admin password from the default to keep any tech-savvy kids from undoing your changes.
If you use a mesh kit to extend your wifi network throughout the house, you can apply restrictions and rules to that too. Google’s Nest wifi kit, for example, allows you to set rules for the family wifi network through the Google Home app. There, you can block sites, create schedules and pause wifi access to groups of devices at the same time every day. You can create groups of devices to apply the rules to, so you can turn on SafeSearch filtering for the kids' tablets without applying it to the adults' devices.
TP-Link’s Deco app also allows you to impose parental controls on a household basis. You can create profiles for each member of the household, linking their devices to it and creating a schedule for content and access filtering.
Alt app stores exist – and the rules are different
Until last year, Apple’s iPhones and iPads could officially only install software approved by the tech giant’s App Store reviewers. That meant Apple had a fairly tight grip on what was allowed on its devices. The only way around that was to jailbreak the phone to install unapproved software.
Under new EU rules, though, Apple has been forced to open up to alternative app stores. As a result you can now sideload apps from outside the App Store – but only in the European Union.
That is great for people who want a wider variety of apps, but what about all those parental controls? The problem is that some of the content restrictions you set only applies to the content that comes through the App Store.
That was brought home when the first native app for porn appeared on iOS a couple of weeks ago, Hot Tub, through an alternative app store.
Apple issued a statement about the app, indicating just how strongly it felt about the situation.
“We are deeply concerned about the safety risks that hard-core porn apps of this type create for EU users, especially kids. This app and others like it will undermine consumer trust and confidence in our ecosystem that we have worked for more than a decade to make the best in the world,” the tech giant said.
“Contrary to the false statements made by the marketplace developer, we certainly do not approve of this app and would never offer it in our App Store. The truth is that we are required by the European Commission to allow it to be distributed by marketplace operators like AltStore and Epic who may not share our concerns for user safety.”
Watch out for video-sharing sites
The range of content on video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram is varied, from useful tips and interesting information to satirical videos and less-wholesome content.
You can’t control what other people are sharing on video platforms. But you can limit your child’s access to it.
Instagram and TikTok have parental controls and dedicated accounts for younger users that restrict some of the content offered, while also preventing others from sending unsolicited messages.
If you have signed in to a YouTube account, you can restrict content based on age rating. But stuff can still slip through, and likewise there are plenty of seemingly innocent videos that hide a darker undercurrent. There is a whole subgenre of Peppa Pig horror, for example, that would make you think twice about Mummy and Daddy Pig, for example.
YouTube Kids, which is an app geared towards younger users, strips a lot of that content out. It has built-in parental controls, access to which is controlled by brainteasers only an adult (or an advanced child) could figure out. That allows you to set time limits or turn off features such as auto play.
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