The Thistle - An E-Newsletter of Scotch College, Perth, Western Australia

From the Head of Junior School

Cyber Safety

Last week, the Junior School students and families had the opportunity to hear from Jordan Foster from ySafe. Jordon spoke to classes from Pre-Primary to Year 5. Her message was based around how to behave online and how to keep themselves safe.

In the evening, Jordan spoke to parents about the numerous sites where students can and do share personal information about themselves. She shared ideas on how parents can help their children to identify the risk and what to do when they feel unsafe.

She provided some sound advice on how help you child manage internet and gaming at a friend's house.

  1. Don't change the rules for your children. If they are banned from games at your house, then they shouldn't be accessing that game at a friend's house. Realistically, we know they aren't always going to stick with that, but it's still important to reinforce your rule and not give it up just because your child is somewhere else.
  2. If your child gets stuck on how to deal with a situation where they want to say no to a friend but don't want the social fall out, brainstorm with your child a few different activities that they could suggest to their friend when the idea comes up. 
    ie. The friend suggests playing Fortnite, but your child knows that's against the rules. You can prep your child with a sentence such as 'That's cool, I thought we could play this game first, or watch this YouTube video about how to make slime, could we do that first?'. This gives an opportunity for your child to divert attention away to a different activity.
  3. If after all of that, the friend's child is still adamant about playing the game or accessing the social media you have banned, ensure you've explained to your child that it's important to tell you what they saw and experienced. It will be essential that you tell your child that you won't tell them off if they tell you, otherwise a communication barrier will occur that will prevent your child from sharing with you in the future. Debrief with them and discuss and explore what they may have noticed. Talk about the fact that this is why you have a rule against it and ask them how they think this actually might benefit them.
  4. Ensure you have adequate parental control settings activated on your child's device that blocks the things you want to block, even when at a friend's house. The manual settings or parental control tools can be used for this, but it is essential that whatever your filtering tools are, that they still work on 4G and hot-spotting, not just on WiFi.

Educating your child is as important as rules of the internet and gaming and parent controls. These simple ideas can assist your child to keep safe when online.