Parents versus kids challenge: Who knows more about protecting personal information?

Back to school is a great time to start having conversations with your family about creating good online habits. Rather than telling kids what they should or shouldn’t do online, consider making it a parent versus kids challenge. Find out who in your house knows more about protecting their personal information online — and bring in a little healthy competition.

Parental controls help you protect your kids online by restricting who they’re allowed to chat with in video games or which apps they can download to their devices. But there’s no substitute for talking with your kids about your rules and expectations. To craft your challenge’s questions and tasks, start with ftc.gov/kidsonline. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Setting your family’s cell phone rules. Start an ongoing list of personal information that should not be shared in group chats or posted online (and why). Keep the list in a high traffic area and add to it. Set a timer to see who can share a screenshot of a phishing text message the fastest. Bonus points if you can spot at least two signs of a scam.
• Protecting online accounts. Start a lightning round of questions at dinner: “How long should your passwords be?”, “What, besides a password, does multi-factor authentication require?”, “What makes a good security question?”, or “When is it okay to share your online account usernames and passwords?”
• Learning from mistakes. Show your kids that it’s okay to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them. Tell three stories about mistakes you might have made online — maybe you paid a scammer, ordered from a fake site, or posted something you shouldn’t have. Let your kids decide which stories really happened, then have them give advice on how to make better choices in the future.

Order free copies of Heads Up: Stop. Think. Connect. to keep the conversation going and share them with other parents in your community so you can all stay on the same page.

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