Preparing parents for a digital dialogue with their children

What are children doing with the media available to them? What are they playing? What kind of videos are they watching on the internet? Should you be worried? The questions are many and varied, and often parents feel left behind… so how do they get ahead of their children's online life?

Date 2019-03-28 Author Danish Safer Internet Centre
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"Digital Brilliant"
To coincide with European Media Literacy Week, celebrated from 18-22 March 2019, the Danish Media Council for Children and Young People launched a new free online resource for parent-teacher meetings called "Digital Brilliant". The resource has been developed as an online toolkit, with activities which can be used by teachers and other professionals to facilitate a constructive and engaging dialogue about children's digital wellbeing.
 
All of the activities are founded on well-known teaching methods to ease working within the digital field. Teachers do not need to be experts in media literacy or digital media since all of the knowledge and advice needed is provided in short videos, presented by different experts in specific fields.
 
It is important to listen to children when it comes to their digital life. Thus, the activities provided involve children in different ways. For example, some of the activities can be used at parent-teacher meetings where both parents and children participate, while other activities require preparatory exercises in the classroom in order to allow the children's own practice, experiences and interest to be the focus of the meeting.
 
An update of the successful parent guide
More than 80,000 copies of the parents' guide "There is so much parents do not understand…" have been accessed, published by The Danish Media Council for Children and Young People in 2015. The guide has now been relaunched in a new version containing the latest digital trends, recommendations and knowledge, aimed at parents of children aged 7-12.
 
The parents' guide covers numerous topics such as time spent in front of a screen, free online accounts, digital foot prints, and age limits for games and social media platforms.
 
The updated version also covers online commercials, children's rights regarding the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (introduced across Europe in May 2018), and an overview of new expressions and concepts used by the children themselves such as "skins", "snap streaks" and "influencers".
 
Find out more information about the work of the Danish Safer Internet Centre (SIC) generally, including its awareness raising, helpline, hotline and youth participation services, or find similar information for Safer Internet Centres throughout Europe.

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