Cybersafety, Cybersecurity and Cyberethics for children (maybe adults too)

I had mentioned in an earlier blog that kids of today seem to be wired at birth. The other day my 4 year old daughter had the laptop propped up and was intently watching a movie on YouTube  and I asked my 10 year old son if he had set the movie up for her and he said “no, she did it herself”, so my husband went up to my daughter and asked her to show him how she had started watching the movie and to our shock and surprise she typed the spelling of the movie (blame me for teaching her to read so soon) on the Google search bar and tapped the enter button and when a bunch of listing came up she clicked on the listing with pictures of the movie on it (she recognized it since she had watched that film before on TV) and was engrossed in watching it till we intervened. Now if my 4 year old did that what about older children and teenagers…

Children  nowadays spend a lot of time on the internet and engage in social networking with their friends and even strangers and most of the adults are not aware of the online activites that their kids are engaging in. Children post their entire profile with their contact information, name, photo’s etc exposing themselves as targets to be lured by online solicitors who could range from a business entity wanting your child to sign up for some online game, program asking them to sign in with all their information or someone targeting your child with sexual material, bullying or inappropriate pranks. A child may not feel comfortable talking to their parent or guardian about it because they might feel embarrased or feel that the adult will not understand, does not have the time, or an adult may truly not be internet savvy or computer literate.

The solution to such situations is to foster open communication between the child and adult, together have them attend educative information sessions on such issues, help the adult get internet savvy and also have the adult join social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster etc where their child socially interacts to know what takes place there and understand the child of this era. This way the child feels that their parents are cool and OK and not living in the stone age.

The best thing an adult can do is spend time with the child, be interested in their activities and engage in them with the child.