With the help of the parents association (PADIA) at Dubai International Academy, we had the pleasure of talking with the parents the other week and it highlighted the need for us to deliver more knowledge to parents. Our children are getting to grips with the technology the second it is released, as digital natives, it’s just easy and normal. For mum and dad though they are sometimes a good few miles behind when it comes to understanding the digital world. It’s that distance and gap that is of a major concern because it positions mum and dad further away from their children as the resources they should turn to when something goes wrong. The digital world is here to stay and aside from keeping children safe, we also have to prepare them for a life spent in this world. Screens for education, social media for business, and digital platforms for communication are mainstays of our world today. Safe effective use of these tools is essential for them to play their part in this ever-changing world.
Top 3 tips for parents
- Use Parental Controls – it’s not about being controlling, it’s not about snooping, it’s about helping block certain apps, allocate specific amounts of time per app and blocking access to explicit content like pornography. Remember that once it is seen, it can’t be unseen. Sometimes, especially with younger children, their brains aren’t physically developed enough to process what they are seeing. A great app to consider is called Boomerang. We did a blog post about it and you can read more here – UseBoomerang
- Talk regularly with your children – make online safety interesting – you actually want to get a conversation or debate going within your family unit. Get their opinions on what’s happening in the news/world. Play a game where you ask them what the most interesting thing they saw/heard online today was. This encourages critical thinking and awareness.
- Listen – it goes hand in hand with point 2. All too often as parents, we want to fix a problem when we hear it (Dads, we’re especially talking to you on this one) When we hear our child or children are unhappy or hurt our instincts kick in and protection or retribution become the priority. We have to learn to listen and not offer our opinion. If we ask our children a question, we have to be prepared to listen to the whole answer, regardless of whether we like what we are hearing, whether we think we can fix the problem, or we want more information. Listening and allowing our children to express their full opinion without interruption is a sure fire way to keep the communication channels wide open.
Sharing our information and the research gathered over the last 4 years of delivering our sessions is something we want to do more of moving forwards but also provide more value to more parents in more schools more often. We are working on a way of doing this, leveraging the digital environment we share information on. Keep up to date on this. As parents, you are going to want to know where you can go, to get up to date content, relevant to this part of the world, in both English and Arabic delivered to your own smart device. This is what we are working towards, so follow us on Facebook and or Twitter to stay up to date with that and make sure you don’t miss out when it comes online.
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