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5 Ways to Teach Children About Their Digital Footprints

adolescents on cell phones

If we walk through the snow, our shoes leave physical footprints. It’s the same in the digital world. As we engage in online activities, we leave digital footprints.  Just as it’s important for kids to learn to leave no trace outdoors,  it’s important for children to understand how their digital footprints can affect them and others. Let us share 5 online safety activities for children.

Understanding how you show up online can be an integral factor in a person’s internet safety. Depending on how skillful someone is, they could use digital footprints to learn about your age, priorities, interests, etc.

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Table Of Contents
  1. Teaching Internet Safety – Activities for Children
    • Explore Other People’s Digital Footprints
    • Ask Your Child to Google Themselves
    • Teach Them to Think Before Posting Online
    • The Importance of Being Careful When Using Other Phones or Computers
      • Encourage Children to Use Different Passwords
  2. Tips on How to Deal with Digital Footprints
children and adolescents on cell phones leaning against park bench

Teaching Internet Safety – Activities for Children

Privacy is a vital component of web safety. If you’d like to teach your kids about digital footprints, you have multiple ways to do that. Check out these suggestions that will help them maintain a higher privacy level online!

Explore Other People’s Digital Footprints

You can talk to your kids, but it’s best to ask them to explore someone’s digital footprints. Pick a celebrity you like and search for them on the internet. You’ll find much information that could reveal their personality traits.

It’s possible to explore the digital footprints of your kid’s friends. If your child has a social media account, browse their friends’ profiles. Discuss what can be discovered based on the posts and photos shown there. The idea is for your child to better understand the digital footprint effects. After several searches, they’ll understand how online activities can provide details about a person, even if that person doesn’t want to share them.

Ask Your Child to Google Themselves

According to Microsoft’s survey, children start using the internet independently when they are eight years old. If your kid already has a digital footprint, ask them to search their name on Google. 

Perhaps the search reveals their e-mail address as “[email protected].” It could sound cool when they are ten, but ask them how they’ll feel about it when they turn 18? Would they be embarrassed if they go for a job interview and an employer could search for that information? That could be an excellent lesson for a child to understand the long-term effect of digital footprints.

If you want to make this lesson more fun, print the search results and ask your kid to highlight the information they’d like to keep private. Cutting and pasting that data into a document can also be a great exercise.

Teach Them to Think Before Posting Online

Your child could be a vast local club football fan. There’s a local derby, and they might be commenting on it on the TV station’s social media page. Their comments include roasting the opposition fans, and there could be loads of teenage slang words you don’t understand. Ask your child if they’d be proud to read those comments in two decades when they have a kid of their own. It’s a good way to explain the importance of thinking before posting. The same is true for photos shared online and sent to others via direct messages.

If you don’t trust your kid enough, you can use parental control apps. You install these on their smartphones and get detailed reports about all messages and even alerts about images and words that contain potentially sensitive content.

The Importance of Being Careful When Using Other Phones or Computers

Digital footprints don’t only stay on the web. Details about the internet activity remain on the device used. For example, your kid could forget their phone at home. They ask a friend to use their phone to check on Facebook messages at school. But if they don’t log out, that friend could still access their profile. That creates the risk of them discovering some private info they shouldn’t have known. Erasing internet history and logging out of all accounts is imperative when using someone else’s phone or computer.

The same goes for public computers in libraries or internet cafes. If you don’t want someone to know what you were looking up, make sure to clear the cookies and history before leaving the machine.

Encourage Children to Use Different Passwords

One of the most important parts of having a digital footprint is keeping your online accounts safe. That’s why you should encourage your kids to use different passwords for each account. It would be best if they also used a mix of letters, numbers, and characters. If they find it challenging to come up with a new password, you can use a password manager to help them.

adolescents on cell phones

Tips on How to Deal with Digital Footprints

As an experienced internet user, you can share the following tips to assist in keeping your kid’s digital footprints safe:

  • Adjust privacy settings on social media. That includes keeping photos and updates visible only to their friends.
  • Not accepting strangers as friends. That way, your kid won’t risk someone that doesn’t know them learning what they share on social media.
  • Avoid oversharing. That includes sharing sensitive information and pictures over messaging apps and other internet channels.
  • Using incognito modes and erasing internet history. Most browsers have modes that don’t track web history. That can be crucial when using public networks.

In Conclusion

Children are increasingly becoming tech-savvy. It’s essential to teach them about digital footprints from an early age to help them make better decisions online. The tips above should give you a good starting point.

Encourage your child to ask about digital footprints and how to behave well online. If necessary, you can analyze the content they already shared and delete anything you find unflattering. As a parent, your task is to guide your kids through the internet world. While encouraging independence is nice, tell them to feel free to look for advice whenever they think it’s necessary!

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Written by:
Nicky Omohundro
Published on:
August 2, 2022
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Categories: Family

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About Nicky Omohundro

Nicky Omohundro is a travel and active family lifestyle blogger and social media influencer based out of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She shares stories, destinations, and ideas on food, family, health, and outdoor recreation to help families find their own adventures. Her spirit animal is a caffeinated squirrel fueled by coffee, real food, and the desire to seek new adventures.

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Hello, my name is Nicky, founder of Little Family Adventure. I'm a vivacious mother of three who wants to assist you in having "No Child Left Inside." With one teenager still at home and two young adults successfully out navigating the world, I'm out exploring the world and traveling with and sometimes without them to provide you with fresh food ideas, travel destinations, and family-friendly activities. Allow me to help you discover your own Little Family Adventure!

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