Cyber Parenting: What is the Primary Role? Strategies
In today’s digital era, the role of parenting has extended from the physical world into the virtual one. Our children spend most of their time online. Therefore, parents must adopt new strategies to ensure children’s safety and well-being. This modern approach to parenting is called cyber parenting.
In short, the primary role of cyber parenting is to guide, protect, and educate children in the digital realm.
Important Phases Of the Digital World
There are four crucial phases of the digital world:
- Digital Divide
- Digital Inclusion
- Digital Literacy
- Digital Citizenship
1) Digital Divide
All the economic challenges faced by individuals, businesses, and geographical areas to access internet services or technology is called the digital divide. Factors contributing to the digital divide are:
- Education
- Income
- Age
- Gender
- Poor Electricity
- Telecommunication Infrastructure
2) Digital Inclusion
Providing technology and internet services to geographical areas that are identified as experiencing a digital divide is known as digital inclusion. Campaigns and participation of all individuals in promoting technology usage to overcome the exclusion in the digital culture are also a part of digital inclusion.
3) Digital Literacy
Literacy means knowledge and study. So, digital literacy means using technology and internet services. It focuses on proficiency and participation in technology and internet usage.
Digital literacy has transformed every aspect of our society, from teaching to learning, social communication, job recruitment, etc.
4) Digital Citzenship
Digital citizenship is the norms of appropriate behavior about tech and internet usage. The nine elements characterized by digital citizenship are:
- Digital Access
- Digital Commerce
- Digital Communication
- Digital Literacy
- Digital Etiquette
- Digital Law
- Digital Rights & Responsibilities
- Digital Health & Well-being
- Digital Security
Parents should understand the importance of education in digital citizenship to avoid any inappropriate behavior while using the internet.
Internet Threats
All the concerned parents must gain the right perspective on how internet threats would impact their children about their children’s technology. Therefore, to simply their understanding, internet threats can be classified into five categories:
1)Tech-Based Threats
They target user devices, networks, and applications. They use malicious codes, wireless hacking, and reverse engineering to threaten people.
2) Human-Based Threats
These threats are intended to harm online users emotionally, psychologically, or monetary—for example; scams, cyberbullying, cyberstalking, etc.
By understanding these perspectives of cyber threats that may harm their children, parents can choose the right parenting styles and implement appropriate solutions.
The practical strategies for concerned parents to combine parenting styles digitally, we present 5 strategies for effective cyberparenting.
5 Strategies for Effective Cyberparenting
- Choose the Right Mindset
- Explore the Use of Technology
- Increase Our Awareness
- Secure the Technology
- Secure the Meatware
Strategy 1- Act On First
Acting first is the first strategy for cyber parenting. The concerned parents must identify that they are considering two dimensions of parenting: Literacy and Digital citizenship.
Parents should understand the balance and importance between parenting literacy and digital literacy. Parents who have low digital literacy often ignore technology for parenting.
In reality, cyberparenting is a vast universe itself, which is proven to help children. The different parents matrix provides an opportunity for the concerned parents to identify themselves what type of parents they are in the 8 digital culture and the type of literacy improvement they need to become cyberparents.
Strategy 2 – Embrace the Technology
Once, you have identified the digital parenting styles, the second strategy focuses on the correct and 100% use of technology, the internet, tools, etc. Cyber parents must explore the use of modern technology to give the best digital culture as their children adopt.
Embracing technology primarily focuses on providing parents with digital skills and knowledge and establishing confident tech communication with their children.
Strategy 3 – Confront With Brutal Facts
Every cyber parent must be aware of brutal facts about the Internet. These include all the threats, internet flaws, etc. This strategy is completely focused on raising security awareness.
All these threats are manageable if the parents know the root cause and the correct way to solve them. As we know, technology keeps regularly updated, so parents should constantly be involved in increasing their security awareness of technology.
Strategy 4 – Technology Security
Similar to strategy 2. Parents should follow to plans – secure the technology and secure the meatware.
How to do it? Where to get more information? I am sure parents will be getting these questions in mind. To recognize these strategies, concerned parents should participate in digital literacy and digital citizenship education programs.
CyberParenting should be focused on teaching children technology security perimeters such as password management, patch management, and antivirus software.
Strategy 5 – Human Security
You have secured everything but you forget your meatware i.e., children. In the end, you are doing all this for them. So, what about their security? Children often get exploited by:
- Cyberbullying
- Malicious manipulation by cybercriminals
- Determination of health and well-being due to inappropriate usage
- Self misbehavior, etc.
It is essential to educate cyber parents about security solution implementation for both technology and end users to overcome internet threats.
Conclusion
Every parent has a different parenting style. By incorporating cyber-parenting, concerned parents can change, protect, and educate their children more extraordinarily.
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