Online Safety for Children: A Parent’s Guide

Online risk is usually discussed as one thing. It is four, they need different responses, and confusing them is why so much online safety advice feels simultaneously alarming and useless.

The four

Content. What a child might see: violence, pornography, self-harm material, extremist content, or an algorithm that has decided what they should watch next. The response here is design. Filters, restricted modes, autoplay off, devices in shared spaces for younger children.

Contact. Who might reach them. Adults posing as children, or simply adults with too much access. The response is settings that limit who can message, and a child who tells you when someone new appears.

Conduct. What they do themselves and what other children do to them. Group chats, exclusion, pile-ons, sending things they cannot take back. The response is almost entirely conversation, because no setting addresses it.

Commerce. The part most often left out. In-game purchases, loot boxes, influencers selling things, and data collected about a child. The response is a payment method they cannot reach and a running conversation about who is making money here.

What to set up

Do this once, properly, and revisit twice a year.

• Child accounts rather than adult ones, on every platform and device
• Restricted or kids modes where they exist, autoplay off
• Message settings limited to known contacts
• No stored payment method on a child's device
• Devices charging outside bedrooms overnight, adults included
• Location sharing off in apps other than the ones you chose deliberately

None of this is a solution and all of it reduces the surface area. Treat it as the equivalent of a stair gate: useful at one age, quietly irrelevant later.

What to talk about

More useful than the settings, and the part that keeps working.

Watch things together sometimes, especially with younger children, and ask what they think rather than telling them. Ask who made this and why. Ask what happens if you scroll for an hour, and how you feel afterwards. Talk about specific situations before they arise: what would you do if somebody sent you something horrible, or asked for a photograph, or said not to tell me.

The one thing that matters most

Whether your child would tell you when something goes wrong. Everything else is secondary to that, and it is decided by what happens the first time they bring you something small.

Say it explicitly and in advance: if anything happens online that worries you, I will help first, and I will not take your phone away as the immediate response. Then honour it. A parent who confiscates on the first disclosure will not receive a second one.

By age, roughly

Under seven: shared spaces, chosen content, no open platforms. Design does the work.

Seven to eleven: child accounts, limited contact, watching together, the first real conversations.

Eleven to fourteen: more access, more conversation, settings agreed rather than imposed. Their social life is now partly here and treating that as trivial ends the conversation.

Fourteen and up: you are an adviser. Judgement, not restriction, is what is left, and it is what you have been building.

If you are worried about a specific situation, contact your local child protection service or a specialist online safety helpline.