Families with young children should be having open, honest conversations about the dangers lurking online. Illustration / Andrew Louis
Every generation has its parenting challenges, but there is no denying social media has created a whole new set of concerns that parents of yesteryear never had to worry about.
With the ubiquity of online tools and digital devices for young kids, parents now have to fret about things such as who their kids interact with online. This can be particularly tricky for a generation of parents who, themselves, did not grow up with internet-enabled devices.
TikTok and Netsafe have released a short guide for New Zealand parents and guardians of teens, with advice on how to keep teenagers safe on the social media platform.
One of the main things parents know about teens’ use of social media is that there is no point prohibiting it – kids will find a way.
According to Netsafe’s chief online safety officer Sean Lyons, a blanket ban on digital devices is not the solution. Instead, parents should be having conversations with their children before they sign up for social media networks.
Lyons says dangers lurk everywhere online and children and parents should be aware of them.
“It’s not the technology that creates the problem, it’s the interactions with others. What are often referred to as ‘bad actors’ can be anywhere. You could spend five years on TikTok and never see anything terrible but if someone chooses to target us and cause us harm, it would not matter what platform we’re on,” Lyons said.
“All across the board, I’ve seen harm on things as innocuous as Scrabble or Words with Friends. Any tool that enables two people to communicate on the internet can be the most dangerous place on the internet for that person at that time.”
For Lyons, the most important thing a parent can do is communicate with their children – and the earlier, the better.
“It’s never too late to step in to support your young people, to help them and understand where their online safety knowledge is strong and where it’s weak,” he said. “You need a plan, you need rules. The rules might be age-based, time-based. You have to know where to seek help if things go wrong. We need support and intervention for when things go wrong.”
The main problem with waiting until something bad has happened to have a talk with your children about online safety is that, often, in these situations, emotions run high and conversations might not be as productive.
However, Lyons stressed prohibition is not the way to go, even if at times it feels like the only solution.
“Lots of young people’s social circles are connected online. It’s not that young people live only online but their actual social circles have a large online component. Somewhere in those circles, they are the primary port of call for support for young people. The danger of prohibition, things like, ‘give me back your phone’, is that we are taking those supports,” he said.
“I say this with all the sympathy in the world, as a parent myself. It’s a tough tightrope for parents to walk, between wanting to protect young children but also wanting to make them more prepared, more resilient and more capable. It has to be a mix of those things,” he told the Herald.
“Once the incident is happening, emotions are high and conversations are emotionally charged and sometimes communication is not very productive. It’s about early intervention. Having those conversations early, making a plan together for if things go wrong – not for when they’re already going wrong. It’s a hard thing to raise but we have to build that trust so that the first conversation is not when something has already gone wrong.
“Banning and blocking things ... young people get around that. We can’t rely on prohibition. We have to help build their safe responses and their knowledge.”
Netsafe recommends creating “an online safety plan”, using its Family Safe Online Treaty to ensure children and their families are better equipped to deal with the risks of being online.
“When you’re putting together a Family Safe Online Treaty try to make sure everyone contributes. Spend some time talking to your child about what being online means in your family and the kinds of choices that you want them to make,” Netsafe recommends.
Aside from “stranger danger”, there is also the problem of teens getting addicted to social media, and spending too much time online, often “doomscrolling” (scrolling through feeds on social media, often to the point where it becomes addictive).
Lyons suggests creating a diary that the parent and the teen fill out together, detailing how long is being spent online and what is being looked at – because not all technology use should be seen the same way. So many educational tools are online these days, and it’s important to distinguish between the intentional use of those and the mindless social media scrolling or the addiction to online gaming.
“For parents, the key is to be aware of big changes in behaviour. If they’ve left the sports team, if their friend group has suddenly disintegrated out of nowhere, if they are talking about someone a lot that you’d never heard of, not going out at all, or going out a lot to the same place ... none of those are a sign of doom but a combination of those should be enough red flags for parents to question why they’re happening,” the Netsafe experts say.
Getting the information directly from your children rather than making assumptions will always give you higher-quality information.
“The majority of parents won’t need to be as involved because the majority of young people will use technology in a way that is moderated by a whole lot of other things, like time and sleep patterns. But for some parents it’ll be really hard,” Lyons said.
The key is to not be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff but to sit down with your children and come up with a plan for “if things go wrong”, even before they sign up for social media platforms or begin accessing the internet regularly.
The same message is echoed by Dr Jed Horner, TikTok AUNZ trust and safety, regional policy manager.
He calls on parents in New Zealand to have “meaningful conversations” with the young people in their care but adds the conversations about online safety “need to reflect the world we live in” (one where teens will find a way to use apps such as TikTok, whether you want them to or not).
Horner said TikTok takes a number of steps to protect young users online, including disabling direct messages for people under 16. He said this is “a really important feature to stop that ‘stranger danger’” but adds it is down to parents to sit with their young kids and ensure they enter the correct information (including their real age) when they sign up. No one under the age of 13 should be on TikTok and accounts of people aged 13 to 15 are set to private by default.
“The safest thing to do is to follow the guidance we’ve put in place and also to have open, honest conversations with their young people, not conversations about avoiding the internet because those are not helpful,” Horner said.
TikTok also has messaging around the length of time young people spend on the app, encouraging them to “take a breather”.
Additionally, there is a family pairing function that allows parents to, among other things, set screen time limits for young people on the app.
To tackle issues such as cyberbullying, Horner said TikTok enables families to make decisions together on who can see comments and who can comment on posts.
“Parents need to be rest assured we are still taking enforcement action as threats evolve. We employ 40,000 people globally to work in this function, included some dedicated to New Zealand,” he said.
If all plans fail, as they sometimes do, parents should keep in mind that they can take things further.
“The first thing a parent should do [if their child comes into harmful content on TikTok] is hold down and double tap, which will take you to a report page. Follow through that reporting process. If parents are overly concerned, they can go to Netsafe and other partners in New Zealand, with whom we work constantly to remove content. And if the content is particularly egregious, they should go to other agencies and law enforcement,” Horner said.
Another thing to keep in mind, if your teen comes to you to talk about issues with their online presence, is to let them know it was a good idea that they reached out to you. Reacting with anger or minimising their worries will only lead to them avoiding asking for help again. Listen to their concerns and focus on helping them with solutions. Even if they’ve broken your rules, help them understand why those rules were there to protect them, and why they should not break them in the future.
Ultimately, young teens are online and will be online however much any parent wishes they weren’t. The key is to maintain an open line of communication with your teens, so they come to you when and if things go wrong. From there, you can go to the relevant social network, Netsafe or, in more extreme situations, NZ Police to take things further.
For more information on keeping your children safe on TikTok, visit TikTok’s Guardian’s Guide. Use Netsafe’s templates to create a Family Safe Online Treaty with your children.
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