A warm relationship with the parents and critical thinking correlates with the child's resilience to online risks.

Banning Internet access is not a solution, and parental control programs don’t offer 100% protection of children online. However ongoing discussions with the child about their online activities and the establishment of efficient safety rules can. This is the vision promoted by the SigurOnline team of professionals.

The primary purpose of the activities we organize for adults is to discuss the concerns they have about educating safe online behaviours in their children and model attitudes regarding children’s online safety.

At seminars, for example, we inform the parents and carers about the risky behaviours that children manifest on the Internet, and we adjust the content based on the specifics of the age and interests of the children.

We talk about the time spent online, age-appropriate games, and accessing harmful content with parents of primary school children. One of the most common difficulties these parents face is creating a healthy habit of managing the time spent in front of screens. Every parent of young children knows what it means to look for the golden middle or to face insistent requests like "another 5 minutes, please!" or "I’m turning it off now, just a little longer."

With parents of adolescents, we address the increased interest of children in social networks and the risks arising from socializing with other users, creating and distributing photo and video content.

Angela Palancean, Child Online Safety specialist, La Strada Moldova: "If we tried to outline portraits of these parents, we would identify at least two patterns. Some, who try their best to "keep the situation under control". They claim to know everything about their child: where, with whom and what they talk about online. Moreover, they have access to the children's accounts on social networks. Others feel discouraged because they have lost control and can no longer manage the relationship with the adolescent like they could before. Thus, they gave up and know practically nothing about their child's life on the internet. "

More and more parents ask us if we organize such discussions with children as well, or if, in school, classes are taught about online safety. The interest arises either from the desire to take the responsibility to talk about online safety off their own shoulders, or, on the contrary, to strengthen the precautionary messages in the child's mind.

During 2019, we managed to organize 17 seminars attended by 350 parents from schools and gymnasiums all over the country. Each time, we got there after being invited by the teachers or the administration of the hosting school. For this reason, we did not limit ourselves to activities in Chisinau, but went to villages and towns across the whole country, as far as we could get: in the North of the country, we went to - Soroca, Donduseni, Rascani, in the center of the country - Hancesti, Rezina, Orhei, Telenesti, and in the South – we went to Cantemir and Basarabeasca.

 

As before, we remain a click away from parents, for whenever they need online counselling or helpful information that we constantly update in the "parents" section on the siguronline.md platform. However, the live exchange of good experiences or failures – the “why not” of parents- remain a necessity. This is how we are slowly building a community and a platform of support, trust, inspiration, and motivation for parents concerned about their children's healthy and safe behaviours in the online environment. 

We invite you to follow the Siguronline.md page to be up to date with the upcoming activities we have planned for parents and adults responsible for children's care and education.