“Don't get mad, get curious”: How to support children to manage risk online
Simon Aston, Online Safety and Wellbeing Officer for West Northamptonshire Council, explains the digital empathy gap and what parents can do to support children and manage the risks they face online.
The digital empathy gap fascinates me. I read a lot about the adolescent brain, which helps me understand why children can be likely to be dragged into certain behaviours.
When I run parent groups, I say that one of the best things you can do is help children to be more empathetic towards each other. That's only going to help both online and offline.
Covid and lockdown had a significant impact on us all. We spend more time online after Covid and lockdown and people are struggling to regulate themselves a little bit more in this online world.
Twitter, for example, has a reputation of being a place where people fire off things that can cause distress.
The limit on the number of characters you can use encourages people to feel they can say whatever they want.
And that can translate to behaviours on other platforms. The biggest bulk of my concerns when I speak to children is WhatsApp groups. They're struggling to regulate behaviours, feeling they can say what they want to who they want, without realising what the consequences are.
Quite often, schools will ring me about particular situations. I speak to schools about what they can do to help teach them and what I can do to come in and run a workshop with Year 5s and Year 6s for example.
We need to do a lot of work with children about healthy relationships. We're changing how we talk to children about relationships now - they're forming more relationships than ever online, but we need to make sure they know the importance of improving relationships in the real world too, because things they see online can often lead to violence against women and girls.
Fundamentally, it comes back to love and belonging both for adults and children. If someone feels isolated, they can get a sense of belonging through playing a game. That can be positive or negative. If someone's being radicalised, they often feel they've found their support network who share similar ideologies to them.
But there are people who have joined choirs, gyms or gardening clubs who have found their community which has helped them in terms of self-worth and self-esteem and connecting with like-minded people.
We are getting more research to say that as a whole, children are behaving differently to how they did prior to Covid. In schools, I'm seeing more 13-year-olds that would have been 10 at the stage of the first lockdown still behaving as a 10-year-old would.
I've also had a substantial amount of conversations with schools about Andrew Tate. For some young lads he's a guru. What really worries me about Covid and lockdown is that for a lot of young children, if they're seeing it on TikTok or YouTube it's real and shouldn't be questioned. They often can't believe I'd question whether what they're seeing is real. If someone has thousands of views or likes on YouTube then a lot of children believe what they're saying without question.
If we look at TikTok, that is built around a very powerful algorithm. All children have got to see is a snippet of fake news or sexualised content and the algorithm will pick up on it and they'll see more.
It's not all just funny dances. It's built in a very particular way to keep the user constantly hooked in. It's designed to be persuasive.
Children and adults need to be aware how these platforms are built, and I'm not sure many adults know.
The challenges we're facing to keep adults and children safe online haven't changed as a result of Covid and the associated lockdowns. They've just gone up.
Peer pressure has always been around but it's so much harder these days. It's accountable for a number of these dangerous behaviours both online and offline. Children think they have to be involved in a WhatsApp group or have to have Snapchat because if not, what are they missing out on?
It isn't as simple as reducing screen time. It's more about getting children to understand how the platforms are built. That might help them not just with their behaviour but why they're spending so much time on their phones.
Snapchat, which is obviously really popular among teenagers, brought out a Streaks feature a few years ago - so the longer you communicate with somebody over a consecutive number of days, the more points you get. I've had teenagers saying they don't want to go away with their family because of it. It's FOMO - that fear of missing out.
Rather than ban and block, it's getting them to understand how apps are built to hook them in. For younger children, building a time limit into YouTube, Snapchat and gaming from a young age is only going to help. And with something like Snapchat Streaks, making them understand that it's not the end of the world if they lose a streak.
If we take tech away from children, we usually find behaviours get worse. It's important not to get too heavy with parental controls because they'll just find ways to get round them and if children stop telling their parents they're doing potentially dangerous things in case they get their phones confiscated, that's counterproductive in the long run.
If as a parent you're concerned, talk to your school as a first port of call. If you're worried about a child's immediate danger, go to the police. And talk to children about their online world. Times have changed and it's not easy to be a young person in the current climate. It can be brutal and it can be pressured and sometimes we forget that.
When we make decisions based on emotions, we can sometimes forget to listen to the child.
So don't get mad, get curious. Don't ban and block. Talk less and listen more. When children start to feel listened to and valued and when they have a say in the boundaries, they're more likely to take buy into what we're trying to do. We often ask children why they've done something but 'why' can be too big a word to comprehend for some children. We can start out more with 'how'.
For example, if a child has started out on Fortnite and ended up on TikTok, perhaps if a parent has talked about their child not having TikTok, asking how they've ended up there. With the internet, that exploration together is key. Parents should watch and engage as much as they can.
The more you try to stop risk, you could be putting children more in danger. When I talk about safeguarding children, I talk about managing risk. What are the risks out there and how can you help your children manage them?
There will be trials and tribulations along the way. You're going to have to let them explore the real world and the online world at some stage and hope what you've put in place works.
We don't have to be negative about social media and the internet all the time. Children will just zone out. Think how much more difficult Covid and lockdown would have been without those things keep us connected. It isn't about not using it. It's just about helping children to manage those risks.
For every horror story I hear, there's always a child in a class who will come up with a really positive example about how they've been able to use social media for good. That's what we want to help children move towards.
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