I spend all my time shielding my kids from being online. I didn't want to have to be monitoring online activities. I pretty much run a screen-free home. I just gave my kids phones this year with very limited freedom.

My approach used to be play ostrich, head in the sand, don't worry about it, just keep them off the internet and social media for as long as I can, except now we really can't. 


Now, in a span of a week, everything changed. Our life just went fully digital. Our church, school, work everything!
Unfortunately, we live in a broken world and there are bad people out there and it is our job as parents to make sure we keep our children safe on and offline.

In the next few days if you weren't Tech-savvy you going to have to learn, not only to help them adapt with digital learning also to help keep them safe.

Here's a few Internet safety for tween transitioning to digital life.

If you weren't already monitoring your kids' internet usage, now is a good time to start. You need to know what's on their phones, what they are downloading, and who are they talking to.

This is not because you don't trust your babies but because you can't trust the creeps and the lurkers who may have access to them.

You can read with them to help them be aware of the dangers and help teach them proper internet safety for teens and tween.

You can use free programs like Google Family Link to set screen time, monitor how much time they are spending on specific apps, monitor which apps they are downloading and so on. This is a great starter kit you can monitor quite a bit if anything you can tell where they spend most of their time and you can craft your conversations accordingly. 

There is another paid App that even allows you to read what they're sending and receiving. Certain internet provider gives the option to monitor your wi-fi, this comes in handy. The kids are bored, they're not waking up early so they're not tired when you go to bed they may be on their devices, wi-fi monitoring allows you to shut down the wi-fi for specific devices in the house.

This is going to be an ongoing discussion as we are learning and adapting to our new normal. It won't be easy but we will get there.

Aside from the monitoring tools, knowing which app does what will also help you stay in the know. This is a list you should keep with you and make yourself familiar with. A while ago our school held a coffee talk for families to educate us on online safety.


Even a heavy internet user like myself there were more apps on this list I didn't know than ones I knew.

The school detective who is in charge of tracking cyber crimes against kids share this list with parents. He also demonstrates how easy those predators make their moves, he posed as a 12-year-old girl and started a chat, it took eleven minutes... I won't get into that right now.

Hope this gives you an idea or at least gets you thinking about online safety.