Keeping Children Safe Online: Is the Internet a Safe Place for Your Child?
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
This week is both Online Safety week and Children's mental health week. This is a very interesting coincidence, because as we are all learning these things are extremely interconnected.
After decades of living with social media, we are finally seeing action to protect young people’s mental health from ever more addictive platforms. There are finally calls to ban these platforms until they get their act together. But there are also issues with mobile games targeting children and we are only just discovering the potential risks of AI.
This year’s theme for Children’s Mental Health week is “My Place”. The concept is creating spaces and communities where young people feel safe and where they can thrive. We HAVE to ask ourselves if the current versions of the online world are safe for our children.
Our belief is that most of them are not.
Social Media companies have shown that they do not care about young people’s mental health and have created addictive platforms where hate and sensationalism is more rewarded than kindness and genuine connections. Increasingly kids are seeing AI generated fake content and there are still not the right blockers in place to keep them safe.
Online Gaming sites like Roblox have huge issues around predatory behaviour and while they are making attempts to create age verification, they are still not addressing some of the extremely inappropriate content created by users on the platform.
With AI, it seems like the same mistakes are being repeated. We are using children as “test subjects” giving them access to a power that they are not being shown how to use well. We’ve seen huge impacts on education and some terrifying instances of emotional dependence on chatbots, to the point of self harm and even suicide.
So what can we do? Should we ban it all?
No! Though in their current form, it’s important that parents pay close attention to age recommendations and that they check out these technologies for themselves. You would never let your kids go to a place in the real world you know nothing about. The same should apply online.
Is there anything that can be done?
As an organisation that promotes STEM, TECgirls believes that the solution to all of this is to have open and honest conversations, so people are aware of what is good and bad about different platforms. It’s why we run our Cyber Guardians Club for primary school girls and talk about what is safe and not safe online. And why we are running a Families First Phone Workshop to understand what guardrails need to be put in place. We are also asking teens in Cornwall how they are using AI and how they feel about AI, so we can start important conversations about what good AI Citizenship looks like.
Beyond education, we need to ALL push for improvements to the platforms. The technologies in principle are fantastic. Places to connect with friends. A chance to build and play games. The opportunity to use the world's knowledge to make things better. Social media, online gaming, and AI could all be fantastic places for young people, if they were actually built with young people’s well being in mind.
And that is our hope at TECgirls, that we can encourage and inspire young girls to understand these technologies. To challenge and question their current problems. And then to think about what kind of online world they would like to build. The places they would like to hang out where they can be safe, supported, and able to thrive.
Want to learn more about keeping children safe online and navigating AI responsibly? Watch Caitlin’s keynote from the Cornwall in AI Education Summit 2026, Where Are The Guardrails?”
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