Digital Safety Week: 7 Tips in 7 Days—#6 Rules For Friendships

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You cannot just let your kid be friend with anyone they find appeasing. There are certain things that parents should look into before their kids get into deep relationships of friendship or love over the internet.

The Foremost Rule: If You Know Them Offline, You Can Be Friends Online

It’s time that you have a talk with your child about who is on their friends list. The most basic criterion is to have a check on their offline friends and reconcile them with their online friends. If you are not doing this, then there is certain information of your child that may turn at risk:

·        Real name

You can have fake social media account IDs but if your kid is using their real name, then it’s very easy for someone to match together identity of your kids, just with a single comment, or a like on someone else’s profile.

·        Location

Kids really have no idea how much information does one check-in post can reveal to strangers. A single photograph with numerical address and name of a store is enough for anyone to determine the rough calculation of a teen’s address. If a person knows your real name, it’s just a matter of time before they can find where you live.

·        Personality

With a hefty auto-biography of one’ own life, social media accounts can reveal everything about kids’ personality, their taste and other things they are interested in, and this is the kind of information that online pedophiles and predators are looking out for!

If you are scared of a predator contacting your kids, keep reviewing their phonebook and online friends on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Ask your teen at least something about every friend that’s on the list.

Chances are pretty high that your teen would say that they know everyone very well. You need to be very careful while treading through this kind of conversation. If not, your kid may consider that as question on their judgement.

The best solution is to have internet rules as early as possible. We suggest you to have this limitation written down in their smartphone contract so for easy enforcement.

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