Which video games are safe for my child? A King5 interview with Amity Addrisi and Lisa Honold
Simple decisions by parents can endanger or ensure safety for kids online
Founder Lisa Honold recently chatted with Amity Addrisi, the host of New Day Northwest, to discuss how parents can decide which games and apps are safe for their kids.
Many games, even the popular “kid-friendly” games, have a chat feature built in. What parents don’t know is how predators and bullies can use this feature to harm a child.
How risky is it to let a child chat with strangers online?
Open chatting inside a game or on social media can lead to horrible outcomes - things like adult predators posing as kids and starting to groom your child to trust them. As they become “friends”, they will pressure your child to send private information, like their address, to the predator. Or to send nude photos or videos to the predator. Or to meet in person.
Games with chat features also expose kids to inappropriate language, extreme violence, and meanness.
What you may not know is that when your child is exposing themselves to other children they don't know, there's a much higher likelihood that they'll be bullied online - when people are strangers and they don't know each other in person, it's a lot more common to see bullying happen.
Pro tip - parents can block downloads for kids, so you get to have a conversation with them about if the game or app is appropriate BEFORE they download it and start playing it.
How do parents know what games and platforms are safe for kids?
Check the app store to see the rating and reviews
Check Common Sense Media for reviews by parents, experts and kids
Download our parent guide called “The Five Steps to Yes” for simple process to decide which games and apps are right for your child. Best of all - your child or teen does most of the work!
When your child asks if they can download a game or app, the first thing you should do is get curious and ask some questions - Why do you want it? What's great about it? Who else has it?
Second, ask your child to research it - an 8 or 9 year old can do their own research and come to you with their findings. Send them to trusted sites. They're looking for safety features, risks, the overview. Let them show you a video of how it plays or what it can do.
Third, have them present their findings and have a conversation based in your values.
Fourth, decide if it's a no or a "trial yes".
Fifth, if it's a yes, revisit it in a week. How's it going? What are you noticing? Any behavior changes? Attitude changes?
How do parents talk about online dangers with our children? How do we let them know about the dangers without freaking them out?
What parents need to remember is you're playing the long game. You’re parenting to promote healthy, responsible, thoughtful kids, teens, and young adults and this happens over time, with lots of conversations, role playing and checking in.
Online safety and online health are a series of conversations, conversations that evolve as kids grow up. So you can start as early as 4 or 5 years old, teaching kids to ask before downloading or playing new games, helping them start to identify what's normal and what's icky - what they need to tell you about, like if they hear or see something weird in a video or in the comments on YouTube.
As they get older you can tell them - there are 4 BILLION people online and they're not all good guys. The internet wasn't designed for safety. Bring in age-appropriate news stories and tie into what school is teaching them about digital citizenship.
How do parents continue to monitor kids as they get older while giving them more freedom and independence?
This is tricky. Some parents feel like kids need 100% privacy and that means they can't check in on them or find out what they're doing.
That's just not true. Kids and teens NEED parent input and guidance and there's no way you can do that if you’re not actively supervising what's going on.
Kids don't know what they don't know - Parents, you have life experience and are able to teach them who is a good guy and who is a bad guy online, even if you don't know everything about the latest app or platform. It’s okay to start a conversation about this even if you don’t know everything.
Lots of conversations. Lots of "what if" conversations about things that happen in the news or happen to their friends - about online safety, ethics, mental health and wellbeing.
A monitoring app like Bark. Bark will send you alerts when there's something that needs your attention. It will flag inappropriate emojis, videos, abbreviations, comments, posts on social media, YouTube…
How do we protect teens from the tragedies of online bullying?
The number one thing we can do to protect teens is to be a trusted adult, be someone who they WILL come to when they have a problem. Any young person online is going to encounter bad stuff - pornography, violence, predators, bullying - and they need to be able to talk to an adult about it.
Make sure your kids know they can tell you anything and you'll be able to handle it without freaking out. And help them identify other safe adults if they just can't come to you.
Keep the lines of communication open.
What should parents be aware of when it comes to online safety?
Parents need to be aware that the internet, as great as it is, is not built for safety. Kids are by default not safe on social media and gaming platforms. Part of modern parenting is discussing how to be a good person online, teaching your kids to use settings and features to make the apps safer, while practicing what kids can do when bad stuff happens (because it will).