Digital Parenting Advice to Protect Kids Online

Technology is everywhere in our world. When many schools require it for class and homework, even young children can’t escape it. But what is a parent to do? Parental control software companies claim they’re the answer, but are they right? Are there other things parents can do? Or are the dangers just being overstated? If you have a child, digital parenting needs to be on your radar.

See Child Safety Tips with Steve Lazarus for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.

Steve Lazarus is an author and social media influencer on personal and child safety topics. His experience in safety comes from a long FBI career. He spent fourteen years in the Air Force before moving to the FBI. The first half of his FBI career was doing what they call “general criminal” stuff – bank robbers, gangs, drug dealers, and stuff like that. Eventually a friend asked if he wanted to try something different and become a bomb technician. Steve saw an opportunity to do cool stuff and gain new skills, so he went through the selection process and spent the rest of his FBI career as a public safety bomb technician. Much of what he did was investigating explosions to gather information and figure out who built the bomb, if possible. Since his retirement from the FBI in 2018, he has been helping train future members of the Emirati intelligence community.

From Social Media Skeptic to Digital Parenting Influencer

For a long time, Steve was staunchly anti-social media. He didn’t even have a Facebook account until around 2022, and even then it was only to see what his high school friends and his nieces and nephews were up to.

Then he wrote a book. Steve isn’t a famous guy, so it was published with a small independent publisher. And he found out fast that if you want to actually sell any books, you have to hustle. One of the ways you can do that is through online presence. He learned how to make and post videos on Instagram and TikTok. The content he posted was mostly based on his background as an FBI agent. When looking at content other people were making, he started seeing a bunch of “Five Things I’d Never Do” from different careers. He figured he could come up with five things he’d never do as a retired FBI agent.

One of the things he said in that first video was that he would never allow his kids to have unlimited, unsupervised internet access. He didn’t think that would be controversial. But he got a bunch of people saying he was a horrible person for advocating no-notice inspections of devices and that kids have no privacy rights on a device their parents are paying for.

Steve kept doing that style of video about other topics. Just after the 23andMe hack, he did a video about why he would never send his DNA to one of those companies. That one went super-viral, getting over 10 million views on both TikTok and Instagram. Suddenly, people started asking to collaborate or for sound bytes. A friend in the UK let him know that he was in their tabloids. It’s a far cry from reluctantly having a Facebook account!

The Key to Digital Parenting

Parenting in a digital world is complicated, and lots of people have lots of different answers to the details of what you should do. But Steve’s advice is much more general – remember that your job description is in the name. You need to be your kid’s parent, not their friend. They have enough friends encouraging them to do stupid things. You don’t need to be enabling it.

The number one thing I would tell parents is your job description is in the name.

Steve Lazarus

If you don’t know what your child is doing on their devices, that’s a problem. Steve’s not talking about your seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid, he’s talking about your ten- or twelve-year-old. Digital parenting is a sliding scale, not an absolute line. But if you don’t know what your child or young teen is looking at, if you’re not monitoring your kids with a parental control app, and that kid is alone with the internet for hours, you’re parenting wrong.

It Used to Be Easier

Parenting around digital stuff used to be a lot easier. When Steve’s kids were young, their household internet was dial-up. The connection wasn’t great, and Steve could end their internet session by picking up the phone. They eventually got DSL, but smartphones didn’t start to become a major thing until his kids were graduating high school. While they were growing up, the family had a single desktop computer. It was internet-accessible, but it was also in a public area of the house. Anyone could walk by whenever and see what they were doing.

You can tell parents not to let your kids have a computer in their room, but if they have a phone, they have a computer in their room.

Steve Lazarus

You can tell parents all you want not to let their kids have a computer in their room. But if they have a smartphone and they’re allowed to take it into their room with them, they have a computer in their room. The main thing is to have a relationship with your kids where you can talk to them.

Steve is quick to remind parents that they are the ones paying for that phone. If you think your child is doing something on it that they shouldn’t be doing, you own it. You have the right to demand they hand it over and let you look at what they’re doing. It rubs a lot of people the wrong way. People often tell Steve that his kids must hate him. But everybody has a choice, and Steve’s choice is to be a parent.

Sextortion is a Huge Risk for Kids

Sextortion is a type of scam that frequently targets kids. It’s hugely important for parents to know because some kids commit suicide over it. There’s a reason car rental companies won’t rent to you until you’re twenty-five, and it’s because your brain isn’t developed until then. When kids get online, they can easily make bad decisions.

Boys are targeted much more than girls with sextortion. When a horny twelve- or fourteen-year-old boy gets online and thinks a girl roughly their age is interested, it’s not hard to convince them to send pictures of themselves in their underwear, and then naked. Then they can be blackmailed. Usually with kids that young, they’re not after money – they want the child to send more photos or engage in sexual activity. It’s getting to the point where boys are killing themselves rather than tell the police or their parents what’s going on.

The tragic thing is that law enforcement can and will do a lot to shut this down. With many types of scams, the Feds aren’t getting involved if there isn’t a certain threshold of victims or losses. But they will get involved in even one sexually inappropriate act with a child. Even if the person isn’t in the country, the FBI has relationships with other law enforcement entities to shut down things originating overseas. With sexual exploitation of children, only one case is enough to prosecute, no matter the level of damage.

One sexually inappropriate act or sexually explicit act with a child is enough to get the Feds involved, and they absolutely will get involved.

Steve Lazarus

Be Aware of Cyberbullying

Obviously, sexual exploitation is the worst thing that can happen to your child online. But it’s not the only thing you need to watch out for if you’re paying attention to digital parenting. Another major thing to be aware of is just plain cyberbullying. There’s no firewall that will keep other kids at school from making your child’s life miserable through shaming, bullying, organizing electronic lynch mobs, and more. You have to be that firewall for your children.

Moms and dads, you are the firewall for your kids.

Steve Lazarus

Parents have to be involved. And there are things you can watch for. If your kid is spending more time online and having dramatic mood swings, that’s a warning sign. And kids really do want to be close to their parents and have a relationship. If your child has suddenly checked out of their relationship with you, and if you can trace that checking out to more time on their phone or behind closed doors with a device, you have a problem.

The Pendulum of Digital Parenting

Most things run in cycles. That’s true of online safety and digital parenting methods, too. The pendulum swings one way, and we have basically an apocalypse of internet shenanigans. Then it goes to the other side where we’re talking about banning TikTok in the United States.

Pendulums ultimately seek equilibrium. Eventually we’ll settle in the middle. Kids will get smarter, and adults will get smarter. The coronavirus didn’t help – it was a perfect storm of psychological stressors with the added issue that you have to deal with it from your room because you can’t leave your house.

If kids really want to engage in this, parents won’t be able to stop them. The best thing parents can do is teach kids at the outset that there are horrible people in the world and they will try to do terrible things to you. A lot of parents are uncomfortable having that conversation. It’s terrible to need to teach this anxiety to children, but it’s an important part of digital parenting.

It’s terrible to have to teach children to be so pessimistic, but I think in today’s world, you have to.

Steve Lazarus

The big warning sign is behavior that’s not consistent with the norm. But then we have to determine what the norm is and how far outside of that is suspicious. There’s no perfect line to draw. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in a famous obscenity case, once said, to paraphrase, “I can’t define obscenity, but I know it when I see it.” And that’s accurate when it comes to behavior online. But knowing it when you see it takes judgment. And here we are asking pre-teens and young teens to have good judgment. It’s a challenge.

The Internet as a Digital Parenting Resource

The same internet that brings all this misery and grief also has a bunch of people working to educate parents. The information highway runs both ways. You can go onto TikTok or Instagram to search for safe internet tips. Child predators can use the internet to target our children, but we can also use it to get information to help us combat the dangers.

The information highway runs both ways … the same conduit that gives us child sexual predators also gives us the people who can help you combat that sort of stuff.

Steve Lazarus

There’s very rarely a lot of proof one way or the other what someone’s intentions are when they connect with your child online. But parents have “spidey senses” for a reason. Your gut can often be a good clue. The first question should always be, do you know that person? This is true for anyone online. Whether it’s someone messaging your kid on Roblox or a connection request to you on LinkedIn, start with, do you know that person? If not, delete.

Common sense is not very common, but you have to have it to deal with the digital world these days. In some sense, you have to take everything with a grain of salt. Just because you saw it on TikTok, even if it looked legitimate, doesn’t mean it’s real. You have to have a healthy amount of skepticism with everything online.

You can find Steve online @steve_lazarus_books – that’s his handle on Instagram and TikTok and his page on Facebook. He also has a website, stevelazarusbooks.com. His novel, Call Me Sonny, is available now and can be bought on Amazon or wherever books are sold. It’s inspired by a true event from his FBI career, and he’s working on a sequel now.