Parenting in the Digital Age: Supporting Your Child’s Online Wellbeing and Safety

Similar to how you talk to your child about their life at school, communicating with your child about their life online can play a crucial role in helping them foster a healthy and supportive relationship with apps, games, and social media. Open dialogue about online activities allows parents to understand their children’s digital world and share important discussions that are meaningful to the child. Parent-child communication about online activities builds trust, understanding and stronger bonds, ultimately benefiting the child’s development and well-being both online and off.

Through ongoing GNS initiatives like WinAtSocial, we are supporting students to understand the impacts of their online activities, the value of their personal data, and how to effectively and responsibly manage their digital footprint. Continuing these conversations at home is important as it highlights these are not just “school discussions” and should be important topics and considerations for a students’ life outside of school also.

In order to help parents and caregivers engage in these conversations with some additional context and knowledge, we have curated several guides to some of the more popular apps, games and social media platforms that your child may be using. We have also included a series of new resources from the BC Ministry of Education to support understanding of the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence and what that might look like in the future of education.

Game & Social Media Resources

• A Parent’s Ultimate Guide to Minecraft
• A Parent’s Ultimate Guide to Fortnite
• A Parent’s Guide to Roblox
• A Parent’s Ultimate Guide to Discord
• Talking TikTok: A Family Guide
• Parent’s Guide to SnapChat
• Parental Guide for Teens on Instagram

Artificial Intelligence Resources

• A Parent’s Guide to Discussing AI
• Information for Parents and Caregivers: All About Artificial Intelligence (BC Ministry of Education)

If you have additional questions, areas of concern about your child’s online activities or would like more information about platforms not listed above, please reach out to Jon Hamlin, GNS Director of Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship.