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How to Keep Kids Safe Online

5 Ways to Keep Your Kids Safe Online

How to Keep Kids Safe Online
Image Source: POPSUGAR Photography / Levi Mandel

We live in a very digital world, and as the future of this world, our kids are more active online than they've ever been. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they know how to behave on the Internet. It's important that kids develop some sort of Internet etiquette, between posting inappropriate content and participating in cyberbullying. But how do we teach them something that we're still trying to figure out ourselves? According to Faye de Muyshondt, founder and author of socialsklz :-) (Social Skills) For Success: How to Give Children the Skills They Need to Thrive in the Modern World ($11, originally $16), we simply have to treat it the same way we would any other area of their life.

"We set up rules and regulations for everything else in our child's life, but for some reason, this subject matter has kind of fallen through the cracks," de Muyshondt says. "We assume that our kids are going to know all of this stuff, and we kind of assume that they know not to pull out their device at the table, they know that they shouldn't be up all night on their phones, and they know that what you say online lives there forever. The problem is that kids don't know that — they don't know any of these things."

So how do we get our children to learn these things, as well as teach them to stay safe online? Scroll through to see de Muyshondt's tips for instilling Internet etiquette in your child.

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