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With children out of school and sometimes home alone, a child safety expert said summertime is a time of year when predators are working hard to exploit young people online.
With children out of school and sometimes left home alone, a child safety expert said summertime is a time of year when predators are working hard to exploit young people online.
Callahan Walsh, a nationally known child safety advocate and executive director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said there are ways parents can keep their kids safe, when they’re at work or out and the child is at home by themselves.
Walsh is also the co-host of the long running programs “America’s Most Wanted” on Fox and “In Pursuit” on Investigation Discovery.
“We can’t raise our kids the same way our parents raised us, unfortunately. The internet era is here to stay,” Walsh said.
Walsh emphasized that parents should understand technology and have a solid working knowledge of the apps, programs and games their children may be using on their laptop or smartphone.
“The best way to figure out how an app works, or social media platform works is honestly to get on it yourself and poke around,” he told WTOP. “Have ongoing conversations with your kids about safety. When a child is just getting online at a young age, because children are getting online younger and younger these days, it’s best to make sure that you’re using simple messaging, something that’s easy for a child to understand and easy for them to remember. Make sure it’s not fear-based.”
He said conversations need to evolve as the child becomes older and more internet savvy.
“As the child gets older, that conversation should mature as the child matures. When you’re talking to your youngest kids about online safety, it’s not going to inappropriate websites, not revealing personal information. But as your child matures, it’s talking about cyberbullying and sexting and things like this,” he said.
Walsh said it’s critical for parents to set ground rules early on, and make sure the sites that children are visiting and the apps they’ve downloaded are age appropriate. He said he is also a big fan of utilizing built-in or third-party parental blockers.
“We’ve even seen these predators sharing tips on the dark web about how to groom children online,” Walsh said. “They know that’s where the kids are and that’s where they’re going to go to try and meet them.”
It’s particularly important, he said, to have a regular dialogue with children about both the benefits and dangers of being online, because his organization in 2023 received 36 million tips about possible online predatory behavior.
“The internet has created life for the better in so many ways, but it’s also created new ways to exploit our children, and predators know that and use the internet, use social media platforms, use video games as ways to get access to our children. … We see these cases all the time,” Walsh said.
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