NetHui 2020: Parents Awareness of their childrens experiences of online risks (Neil Melhuish)

Kia ora, my name is Neil Melhuish from Netsafe, and I’m going to be presenting the results of a study that we’ve completed that looks at parent, caregiver and whānau awareness of children’s experiences of online risks and harm. Now, this study we’ve completed as part of the Global Kids Online project. You can go and check out their website to learn a little bit more about this work, but Netsafe is New Zealand’s member of Global Kids Online. So just going to have a look through some of the headline findings from this study. So, the first takeaway perhaps isn’t a big surprise. The main takeaway…

New Zealand parents 00:40 - caregivers and whānau aren’t aware of all the risks and harm that children experience online, and what this study does though is look underneath that and starts to measure some of what that actually looks like in a little bit more detail. So, first of all what we found is that parents can be the last to know about children’s online risk and harm experience, so there’s a difference between their awareness of what they think has happened for their child and what has actually happened for their child. This finding illustrates that where 19% of parents thought that something had bothered their child in the last year while 25% of their children actually told them that they had been bothered by something in the last year. What we then went on to find is that parents are really well aware of how upset their children get when they have been bothered by something online, and you will see here - feel free to pause to have a closer look at this - but you will see there’s really great agreement between parents’ awareness and children’s actual reported experience in terms of the impact - the emotional impact - that it’s had on them when when something’s happened to them online. So, what we also found is that there’s differences in levels of awareness for different types of online risk.

02:05 - So, on the left hand side of this chart here you’ll see there’s a conduct risk which is, may be, being treated in a hurtful way or treating somebody else in a hurtful way, and you’ll see that parents and children are in close agreement there. A little less so on the right hand side there which are conduct related risks where somebody’s making contact with somebody online for the first time before they met them in the physical world for example. However, the biggest difference we found is around teenagers’ exposure to a range of content risks where you see there is actually quite a significant gap there between parents’ awareness and what teenagers have actually told us they’re seeing in terms of the kind of content that they’re seeing online. Overall though, really good news, parents caregivers and whānau do feel quite confident in supporting their children to cope, but the picture is mixed. Nearly half are definitely happy, 44% a fair amount, and seven percent not So much, in terms of how confident they are helping their child to cope.

So in 03:16 - summary, a substantial proportion of parents are aware of their children’s upsetting online experiences, but not all parents and not all experiences. However their awareness of the negative emotional impact on their child is actually very, very similar to their children’s actual experiences which is great news. When it comes to risk, the biggest gap we’ve seen is parents’ awareness of teenagers’ exposure to different types of potentially harmful content. It is quite a lot lower, and overall they are pretty confident in supporting their children as they navigate online risk and harm… but there is room for development. One of the things that Netsafe has been doing is taking the insights from this work to inform the development of its resources that it produces for parents in that supporting role.

04:15 - What we also have coming up are some findings from a study which is looking at the types of parenting style that are being used by parents, so it looks a little bit further into that question of confidence and seeing the sorts of techniques that are being used. So if you have any questions about this work or any of the other research that Netsafe is doing please feel free to contact me at the address that you just saw there. Thank you very much, kia ora. .