What do you do if you catch your children talking to strangers online? Do you immediately panic and ban them from social media? Or do you have a calm, rational discussion about online safety and teach them life long skills to deal with it? Parents panic when finding out their children have blundered through all internet safety protocol and have made friends with people they don’t know.<\/p>\n
According to a poll by VoucherCodesPro.co.uk, 57 per cent of parents have caught their children chatting to strangers online. Of these, 72 per cent thought their child was happily playing away quite innocently because they had put parental restrictions in place.<\/p>\n
Nearly 2000 UK parents took part in the research, all of whom had a child aged 8 and over with access to a computer.<\/p>\n
Upon discovering the online chatting, 39 per cent of parents dealt with the problem by instantly banning their child from accessing the internet full stop. In fact, most of the top responses were knee-jerk reactions. A 24 per cent deleted their child’s social media accounts and 14 per cent instantly grounded their child, taking away all the devices they had which could connect with strangers. Just 18 per cent decided to use the incident to teach children about how to stay safe online.<\/p>\n
Only 35 per cent of parents who had spotted their child talking to strangers felt their method of dealing with the situation was effective enough to stop it from happening again.<\/p>\n
Spokesperson for www.VoucherCodesPro.co.uk,\u00a0George Charles said: \u201cParents still seem to struggle a little with the rate at which the internet is growing and changing. Even younger parents are finding themselves struggling to keep up with the amount their children know about the internet which seems to now be putting them at risk. Teaching children about internet safety is imperative in preventing anything serious from happening, especially as parental blocks cannot be relied on.\u201d<\/p>\n