BY Eng. PRUDENCE KADEMBU, VALENTINE NACHI, IVY CHIPINDA
Over the past few years, digital transformation has presented a myriad of opportunities for many businesses and individuals.
We can now do business or shop online, work and learn from home, even use real-time data to make travelling decisions.
While these great rewards have been realised, the digital era exposes children to cyber threats that include online grooming, child pornography, illicit games, just to mention a few.
This has resulted in more harm than good in areas where children’s activities are not monitored while they are online. The internet is a very powerful resource that can nature children if used responsibly or destroy them, quite unfortunately, if used irresponsibly.
Parents who do not manage their children’s online activities are often taken by surprise when they notice a lot of unexpected transformations in their children when they get the wrong exposure online.
Parenting in this era has become a mammoth task as most parents are unsure of how to deal with the challenges of negative exposure. The virtual world is, indeed, a jungle that needs to be navigated with proper guidance and control for children. This is because parents from a pre-internet generation need to manage children that are often far ahead with online knowledge than them.
Children are often far ahead in knowledge than their parents.
- Chamisa under fire over US$120K donation
- Mavhunga puts DeMbare into Chibuku quarterfinals
- Pension funds bet on Cabora Bassa oilfields
- Councils defy govt fire tender directive
Keep Reading
Additionally, parents are also too busy pursuing livelihood opportunities to find time to personally manage their children’s online activities. Thus, the task of raising the children is inevitably delegated to the childminders, who in most cases, are naive where technology is concerned. Busy parents often think that paying for unlimited internet access is the best way of keeping children from disrupting their work.
This may end up being their biggest mistake if unfettered internet access results in negative exposure.
Generally, children’s inquisitive minds lead to hunger for something that keeps them busy. If it’s not schoolwork, then it has to be a game or movie. In their pursuit of interesting online games, they meet all sorts of recommendations for games. With no controls in place, children get exposed to adult games that are often enticing, albeit detrimental to their innocence.
To alleviate these challenges, parents need to be proactive in putting controls as well as monitoring their children’s internet surfing habits.
Google and Apple have very good platforms for this. It allows creating email accounts for children under parental control. With Google Family Link, a parent is allowed to approve of any application a child may try to download from the playstore before they are allowed to do so. As such, parental control can also be enforced on the likes of YouTube via YouTube Kids. Search engines safe for children are also available for instance Kiddle, Kiddoware and Safe Search Kids, among many others.
It is worthwhile for parents to take time to learn how to use the tools that are available for such purposes. Children’s online safety should be every parent’s core objective in parenting.
Parents who are uninformed about the dangers of sharing online accounts with their children pose a danger to their children’s online safety since they leave cyber footprints that later expose the children to potential risks.
For instance, if parents have a habit of watching pornography online, downloading adult games, searching for any other improper content, such content will continue to be recommended to the children if they use the system under their account.
There is, therefore, need to have separate accounts for parents and children using the same devices.
Instead of letting the children discover things online, parents ought to guide them and help them find content that is appropriate for their age groups. Parents may also find ways to make children creative using the internet.
There is so much educational and entertainment material that is appropriate for children. Parents can start cultivating design thinking skills in their children from the earliest possible stages of their lives.
Many parents rely on internet sources to help their children with homework. Likewise, parents can learn and provide exposure to tools and skills that are available on the internet. Using online tools, parents have a chance to groom their children.
The early mentorship facilities that are available on the internet are an important resource base that has never been as readily available to previous generations as they are today.
Parents will be the first ones to admit that finding ways to keep their children occupied productively when they are online is a mammoth task that they must all face. While search engines like Google have indexed billions of online pages, most of us will not know how and where to find these resources on the internet.
Some of us will not have the enthusiasm to face the challenge of searching the internet that is, the so called “search cost”. The few of us that brave the search cost will not know if we are doing too much or too little.
We must keep our focus on the elusive goal of keeping our children safe on the internet. The aim should be to keep them informed, active, excited, and creative. We may also learn from them because children learn by exploration. They will discover things you have not shown them.
They will learn to manoeuvre through new games just as the essence of reinforcement learning in artificial intelligence where a system learns by an accumulation of rewards when they make correct moves or penalties when they make the wrong moves. The same is how children learn. Every parent testifies of how their little children taught themselves to play games from basic to advanced levels. Exposure is all a child needs to learn new skills. Below is a curated list of some of the gaming platforms that can keep children engaged.
- Sheppard Software
This platform hosts hundreds of free online educational games for kids. The site organises its games into categories, which allow students and teachers to easily navigate by subject area and find a suitable game that caters for either an instructional need or a child’s sense of curiosity and thirst for knowledge and challenge.
2 PBS Kids Games
PBS Kids creates curriculum-based entertainment. The games site hosts several browser-based gaming experiences based on popular literary and media franchises such as The Cat in the Hat, Curious George, Sesame Street, and more. Games are organised by subject type, which includes math, healthy habits, science, reading, and teamwork.
3 Mr Nussbaum
This platform was created by Greg Nussbaum, a Virginia public school teacher, Nussbaum boasts over 3 500 content pages with a wide variety of learning games organised by content type and grade level.
This site is also optimised for use on a tablet and an interactive whiteboard.
4 National Geographic Kids
The world-famous National Geographic hosts over 100 fun, engaging, and interactive science, action, adventure, geography and quiz.
5 Engineer Girl
Career Explorations! It is never too early to spark your child’s interest in science. This website is designed to help children, particularly girls explore the field of engineering. It teaches children what engineers do and how they get there, so do not be surprised if your child starts being crafty at home. Imagine your child having some fun outside while building bottle rockets or designing paper bridges….
6 Duolingo
The world is becoming a global village. Very soon, knowing more languages will be a plus. If your child is into languages, why not expose them to Duolingo? Duolingo was made for people who prefer picking up a new skill over playing a game. This could be your child and they can learn a new language for free.
Let’s get the children engaged in activities that build them and open their minds to design thinking and innovation at an early age so that they don’t get into detrimental habits. Scratch programming can help them to start their journey to becoming proficient programmers regardless of their future career goals. Also begin exposing them to career guidance early. Finally, strive to be proactive in your parenting in this era of numerous cyber threats. Together we can overcome.
- Article contributed by ZICT a division of the Zimbabwe Institute of Engineers
