Three Tips For Teaching Your Children About Cybersecurity

How do I get on the WiFi” has become a vital question for modern children. In fact, it regularly comes top of the list of boarding school questions. The internet has opened up massive opportunities for today’s children but only if they learn to navigate it safely. With that in mind, here are three tips for teaching your children about cybersecurity.

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Start by figuring out what your children have already learned

Even if you’ve never talked about cybersecurity with your children, they might still have learned about it from other sources. Unfortunately, as is often the case in life, the quality of these sources can be highly variable.  

If your children have found high-quality educational videos/programming they may have learned a lot of genuinely useful information. If, on the other hand, they’ve learned about cybersecurity through general entertainment programmes, they may have picked up a lot of misinformation.

Either way, figuring out what they have learned already will give you a starting point for your own cybersecurity lessons.

Keep technicalities to a minimum

Unless technology is your job, you may feel you don’t really understand it. This could make you think that you can’t teach your child about cybersecurity. Actually, cybersecurity has very little to do with technology. It’s more about understanding human behaviour, predicting threats and thinking about how to prevent them.

Your children may be too young to understand much about human nature. If, however, they are old enough to learn about crossing the road, they are old enough to learn about predicting and preventing threats.  

In fact, teaching your children about cybersecurity is very similar to teaching them about cybersecurity. You generally start by teaching your children good habits. That way they’re doing the right thing even if they don’t understand why it’s the right thing. You then start to explain why it’s the right thing so they can adapt their learning to different situations.

Get children involved with your home’s cybersecurity

Possibly the simplest and most effective way to teach children about cybersecurity is to talk them through what you do in your everyday life. Most of this will probably revolve around your home. It’s great if you can also talk about cybersecurity when travelling.  

The key to making this work in practice is preparation. Firstly, you need to keep on top of what you need to do to keep your own home cybersecure. Then you need to distil this knowledge down to what your child can understand. Then you need to set aside the time to do the task with your child.

It can be particularly engaging for you to sit down with your child and talk them through anything you’re doing for them. For example, if your child wants an account on a social media platform, talk them through how you’re setting it up.  

Bonus tip – managing passwords

Passwords can be a tricky issue for parents. On the one hand, you want your children to manage their own passwords as much as possible. On the other hand, memorizing strong, unique passwords for each account can be a huge challenge for adults.  

You may, therefore, want to split the difference and have your children use password-managers. It’s true that these are a single point of failure. They are, however, very well-secured and certainly much safer than either using weak passwords or writing down passwords.