ISKL’s Safeguarding 360 Workshop Explores Online Safety

Safeguarding is at the heart of our mission to nurture and protect every child. Last year, we introduced the Safeguarding 360 Series, an initiative led by Ann Marie Simpson, ISKL’s Director of Risk Management, designed to foster shared responsibility between our parents and school and deepen awareness around child protection.

The focus for our first Safeguarding session this academic year was Online Safety & Navigating AI with your Child, with the intent of helping our parents better understand the digital landscape their children are navigating and offering practical strategies to guide and protect them with confidence and care.

At the session, Ann Marie was joined by Rami Madani, Head of School, Charlotte Diller, Director of Technology, and Philip Sandamas, an ISKL parent and cybersecurity expert who talked about the crucial role parents play in setting boundaries aligned with family values, creating family tech agreements, and understanding the digital platforms their children are using, from gaming to AI tools.

Below, Ann Marie shares an overview of the session and explores how parents can support their children in an increasingly online world.

Today’s digital world presents many risks. This also means there is a great range of opportunities. In order to seize these opportunities, it is important for families to establish values that include digital citizenship. It is our responsibility to ensure digital literacy is embedded into the fabric of our lives.

Navigating existing and emerging technologies such as social media, streaming platforms, and AI presents risks that can impact our children. However, opportunities for growth and positive connections exist as well. When we think in terms of how digital spaces can negatively impact children, we use CO:RE 4C’s framework provided by Children Online: Research and Evidence as a guide:

Content: children exposed to harmful graphic material online.

Contact: individuals making contact with children online to exploit them.

Conduct: harmful interactions between one another (cyberbullying, grooming, etc.).

Contract: children being exploited online in the forms of in-app purchases, hacking, and addictive design.

Understanding the ways in which children can be harmed is important in order for us to develop strategies to prevent these types of harm. Educating ourselves in technology helps us to remain aware of possible risks and opportunities. Exploring these areas with our children creates an avenue to connect and learn together.

We can help keep each other safe online by establishing clear values within our family, creating technology agreements, setting boundaries around devices, modeling behavior, staying up to date on emerging technologies, and being a safe space for our children when they need to report something.

When our children come to us, it is important to remember that we are not alone; this can happen to anyone, and we need to assume the role of a confident and safe caregiver. Be supportive, listen, reassure them, stay calm, explain next steps, and seek support.

The world operates in digital spaces; it is evident in group chats, making dinner reservations, maintaining community, banking, e-hailing, food delivery, and apps that help identify the best-suited haircut for our bone structure; the list goes on and on. This digital way of life is not going away; quite the contrary, as more and more businesses invest in research into how to make things easier for consumption online.

As parents, it is important that we are proactive in using the tools at our disposal to provide our children with the safest possible online environment. It looks like family technology agreements, clear family values, and being a safe space for our children. It sounds like talking about our family values and expectations at the dinner table. It feels like relief after intervening on something that isn’t in line with our family values and righting any missteps. What do family values and boundaries look like for you?

For more information about safeguarding at ISKL, please click here.