Parents and children have different perspectives on what’s good and bad online – understanding both sides can help
According to a Kaspersky survey titled Growing Up Online (which included 10,000 online interviews), 17% of surveyed parents in South Africa reported having conflicts with their children because of their children’s online lives.
Yet another 23% state that there are no conflicts regarding this – but only as long as their children’s online activities don’t create ‘real’ problems. Real problems are not rare though: 18% of surveyed parents admitted that they lost money because of their children’s online behaviour, while 10% of respondents stated that their child’s device was infected with a virus.
Going deeper into the reasons behind the conflicts between parents and their children, most of them emerge because of the amount of time that the child spends with the gadget (in 75% of cases). The content that a child watches is the reason for 20% of conflicts of those surveyed. Parents are also often annoyed by their children constantly chatting online and doing nothing useful – this provokes 22% of arguments.
Finding common ground
Conflicts usually happen because of misunderstandings. For parents, it is increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace of the modern evolving digital world, so they are often left out of the picture as they simply do not catch the trends that seem to emerge way too fast. As for children, they tend to move forward with a digital life with limited caution, underestimating the reality of cyber risks and not putting strategies in place to filter the content that they can be exposed to online. However, it is possible to improve the situation by communicating with your child and building trust and a good relationship about digital lives – parents are to help children develop positive digital behaviour skills and habits and teach them basic cyber hygiene.
In order to eliminate possible conflict situations and to help protect the digital lives and experiences of children, parents should aim to:
- Learn more on the topic of children’s cyber security. Explore modern trends, apps and way of behaviour that must be adopted in order to safeguard against digital risks (for instance, the basic security rules while on the internet).
- Communicate with their children and define the borders that are not meant to be crossed. Discuss safe locations with them – both real and web pages.
- Install a reliable security solution, which is a helpful tool to protect children against harmful content and excessive screen time and which supports in monitoring youngsters’ digital online activity.
Text | Seifallah Jedidi
Photography | PeopleImages.com – Yuri A
Seifallah Jedidi is Head of Consumer Channel in the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa at Kaspersky. For more information, go to kaspersky.co.za.
