Keeping Children Safe Online: A Guide for Parents and Carers

The internet is the primary social, cultural and informational environment for today’s children and young people. Children in the United Kingdom spend, on average, more than three and a half hours per day online, engaging with social media, gaming, video content, messaging and a vast range of other digital activity. The internet brings extraordinary benefits: access to information, creative communities, entertainment, education and social connection with people across the world. It also brings significant risks – risks that are inseparable from the benefits and that require a combination of technical safeguards, digital literacy education and ongoing adult engagement to manage effectively.

Online safety is not a niche technical concern: it is a mainstream safeguarding issue. The same principles that apply to keeping children safe in the physical world (appropriate supervision, education about risks, trusted relationships with adults, prompt action when something goes wrong) apply to the digital world. Organisations working with children have statutory responsibilities for online safety, and parents have a central role in equipping children with the knowledge and skills to navigate the digital world safely.

The Legal and Regulatory Framework

Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE), the statutory safeguarding guidance for schools and colleges, places significant emphasis on online safety. The 2023 edition requires schools to have a specific focus on online safety in their safeguarding training, curriculum and policies. Schools must have appropriate filtering and monitoring on their networks and must educate children about online safety as part of the curriculum. For early years settings, the EYFS statutory framework requires providers to take steps to ensure children are not exposed to harmful content.

The Online Safety Act 2023 is a landmark piece of legislation that places duties on technology companies operating services accessed by UK users. It requires platforms likely to be accessed by children to conduct Children’s Risk Assessments and to implement measures to prevent children encountering certain types of harmful content. It establishes a duty for major social media platforms, search engines and gaming services to protect children from harm, enforced by Ofcom. While the Act’s full implementation will take several years, it represents a significant strengthening of the regulatory framework for online safety.

The Key Risks

Cyberbullying:

• bullying that takes place via digital technology, including social media, messaging apps and online gaming –
• affects a significant proportion of children

Unlike traditional bullying, cyberbullying can follow a child into their home and can be amplified by the public nature of online platforms. Signs include: reluctance to discuss online activity, distress after using devices, withdrawal from social activity and declining self-esteem. Schools and settings are increasingly developing specific anti-cyberbullying policies and requiring peer mediation or restorative approaches.

Online grooming: the process by which an adult builds a relationship with a child online in order to facilitate abuse – is a serious and growing concern. Groomers typically use gaming platforms, social media and messaging apps to establish trust before moving the relationship to a private channel. Indicators include: secrecy about online contacts, receiving unexplained gifts, becoming withdrawn or distressed after using devices and changes in behaviour or language. CEOP (the Child Exploitation and Online Protection command, part of the National Crime Agency) provides training resources for parents and practitioners.

Social Media, Age Limits and Reality

Most major social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter)) have a minimum age of 13. The age limit exists because the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in the US (where most of these companies are headquartered) prohibits collecting data from children under 13 without parental consent. In practice, the minimum age is widely flouted and platforms have, until recently, done little to enforce it. Research by Ofcom has found that the majority of 11-year-olds and a significant proportion of 9 and 10-year-olds regularly use platforms with a 13+ age limit.

The concern about young children on social media is not simply about inappropriate content, though that is significant. It is also about the design of these platforms (which are optimised for engagement in ways that exploit psychological vulnerabilities, including the developing brains of children) and about the exposure to social comparison, cyberbullying and exploitation. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the UK’s chief medical officers and a growing number of psychiatrists have raised concerns about the impact of social media on children’s mental health, particularly for girls.

Parental Controls and Monitoring

Parental controls (technical tools that restrict or filter what children can access online) are a useful component of online safety but are not a complete solution. Modern devices and platforms offer built-in parental controls including screen time limits, content filters, location sharing and activity reporting. Most broadband providers offer family filtering at the router level, which can be enabled without any technical expertise. Apple’s Screen Time, Google’s Family Link and Microsoft’s Family Safety are the most widely used device-level tools.

The limitations of parental controls are well-documented. Determined children circumvent them. They do not cover all platforms or content types. They do not address the social and psychological dimensions of online risk. And overreliance on them can create a false sense of security that discourages the ongoing conversations that are, in the long run, more protective. Research consistently finds that children with a trusted adult they can speak to about their online experiences are significantly more resilient to online harm than those who are technically monitored but relationally unsupported.

Digital Literacy: Teaching Children to Navigate Online Risk

Education is the most durable protection against online harm. Children who understand how the internet works (why certain content is harmful, how data is used, what grooming looks like, how to evaluate the reliability of information) are better equipped to make safe choices and to seek help when something goes wrong. This education needs to be ongoing, age-appropriate and honest rather than purely cautionary.

The RSHE (Relationships, Sex and Health Education) curriculum, statutory since 2020 in all state schools, includes online safety and digital literacy as required components. Children should know about:

• the permanent nature of anything shared online
• the legal minimum ages for platforms
• the difference between a public and private digital footprint
• where to report concerns (including CEOP, Childline and the school DSL)
• the importance of telling a trusted adult if anything online makes them feel uncomfortable

CEOP, Childline and Where to Report

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection command (CEOP), part of the National Crime Agency, operates the ThinkUKnow programme, which provides free online safety education resources for children aged 4–18, parents and professionals. CEOP’s online reporting tool can be used by children, young people or adults who are concerned about online grooming or abuse. The “Report Abuse” button on the CEOP website is one of the most important digital tools available to those concerned about a child’s online safety.

Childline (0800 1111) is available 24 hours a day for children and young people who need support with any issue, including online concerns. The NSPCC’s Net Aware website provides regularly updated information for parents on the most popular apps and platforms and the specific risks associated with each. Parents who are concerned about a child’s online activity should contact their child’s school DSL, CEOP or, in cases of immediate concern, the police.