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But, as we all know, the Internet isn’t all good – just as it’s made the world a smaller place and let us seamlessly share knowledge, innovate and engender positive change, so it also presents an almost limitless platform for the worst traits of humankind. It’s no secret that the Internet is awash with unsavory material, of course, but as its volume increases and it gets easier to get online – even our TVs often now include a web browser – so the danger increases of stumbling across one of the Internet’s dark alleyways.

Now that mightn’t be such a problem for an adult – just as most of us know better than to stroll into a bad part of town, we’re usually smart enough to avoid offensive online material; but our children are yet to develop that insight. They don’t have the experience to judge whether a link looks suspect, or necessarily know that words or phrases they’re typing into a search engine can have multiple meanings. Nor are they likely to rein in their natural curiosity about a subject because some things are better left unseen – especially if they heard a friend talking about it in the playground.

So how do we equip our children to deal with this ultra-connected digital world and protect them from viewing explicit or inappropriate material? There are two main schools of thought: censorship is the first, most obvious approach – just ban the bad stuff. But history testifies that censorship rarely works and it impacts civil liberties. More pertinently, the Internet is such a vast, uncontrollable landscape that policing it will never be 100 percent effective.
The second approach, the one I and my colleagues at AVG Technologies support, is education: just as we teach our kids to avoid certain areas or situations and to recognize warning signs, so we must educate them and equip them with the knowledge to safely and freely navigate the online world, while also carefully protecting their privacy. But to do that, the parents first need to have that knowledge themselves.

According to a recent AVG online survey* of 4,000 women across the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and Brazil, 77 percent of mothers consider their role to be absolutely central in guiding their child’s ‘connected’ digital life, and 65 percent of them allow their kids to use their mobile device. Yet the same survey revealed that more than a third of the respondents don’t password-protect their mobile device – one of the simplest ways of preventing a child from accessing the Internet unsupervised – and that’s despite nearly a quarter of them admitting that they store content on their phone they’d rather their child didn’t see. Furthermore, almost a fifth of parents said they don’t monitor their child’s internet use at all.

But educating parents about practical measures to protect their kids – whether passwords or limiting web access via direct supervision, built-in parental controls or more advanced family safety software – are just part of the equation. Most children now have a phone of their own from long before they’re 10 years old, so it’s unlikely we’re ever going to be able to control exactly what they do on them. Far better to educate them about how to use the Internet safely – but that in itself presents a stiff challenge.

Indeed, I would argue that effectively and appropriately educating our children about the Internet’s dark side represents the single greatest challenge facing a parent today. I say that not so much because of the consequences – keeping a child safe from physical threats will always be a parent’s first priority – but because we’re so poorly equipped to deal with it. Technology is evolving so fast it’s tough to keep track of how the Internet is affecting our own lives, let alone fully understanding how our children use or perceive it. Plus, we have little prior knowledge of how to deal with this challenge – we didn’t grow up in an online world, and while there’s still value in the common-sense lessons our parents taught us, they don’t always translate easily to today’s connected lifestyle.
To me, there is a clear need for an immediate and dramatic increase in the level of education around Internet safety. Some forward-thinking schools have already started to teach their pupils how to stay safer online, but I believe it should be taught in every school as part of primary and secondary curricula. Furthermore, it should be taught to parents, grandparents and other carers, so that they can support the schools’ efforts outside of the classroom and take positive action to protect their children. [NS1] It’s not enough to simply expect people to know about this newest of life skills, not least because our children are growing up as digital natives and living their lives online in ways literally unrecognizable to our generation.

You may question where this educational responsibility lies, but as parents we have an innate duty to safeguard our children. And although government legislation, education authorities and individual schools must play a significant role, we cannot rely on them to drive the change because this online evolution is moving too fast. It’s vital we make the time and invest the necessary resources as soon as possible to ensure our children don’t just grow up as digital natives, but as true digital citizens.

*An online survey of 4,000 women was undertaken across the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany and Brazil. The survey was set up using Qualtrics and respondents were from Qualtrics’ online panel. Fieldwork took place in April 2013.