Ways to promote digital resilience at home
Digital resilience is not fixed. It’s not a single ability or a set of lessons that can be learnt. We encourage that parents employ the same parenting skills that you use offline to keep your children safe, such as negotiating boundaries, talking about the difficult subjects we’d all rather avoid and helping your child to recognise what’s good and bad behaviour.
- Set fair and consistent rules in relation to your child’s internet use at home. As they get older, try to agree the rules with them so that they have some control over their digital world.
- Teach your child to think critically about what they read, see or hear online. As they get older they need to be able to assess for themselves whether they are in a risky online place and whether the information they are receiving is reliable and helpful to them.
- It’s much harder for people to empathise with each other when their communications are digital. This is why trolls find it so easy to post horrible messages. Helping your child to understand that and to pause and think about the impact of things that are posted online, will help them cope with some of the difficult behaviour they will come across and avoid getting caught up in it.
- Maintain a positive outlook on your child’s use of the internet.
Whatever your views on the games they play or the videos they watch on YouTube Kids, if you criticise the apps and games they love, they’re not going to want to talk to you about their online life.
- Children who can recover from an online mistake can learn and avoid making the same mistake again. You can help by making it easy for them to talk to you about their mishaps (that means trying to keep calm even if you’re at your wits’ end!), and making sure they know where to go for help if they need it.
- Allow your child to explore and take charge of their online life.
Having some control over any given situation is an important part of resilience – and it’s a really important part of digital resilience. It’s essential in helping them understand and develop their own sense of what’s right and wrong online.