Young people are spending increasing amounts of time online. It’s how they stay in touch with family, connect with friends and learn remotely. Safer Internet Day, celebrated globally on February 8th, is an opportunity for parents to stop and evaluate how their kids are spending time online, and become familiar with the available tools and resources to make kids’ interactions with the online world safer. Ericka Sóuter, a nationally recognized expert on parenting, is available to share top tips on how parents can create a safer experience for their kids while they’re online. She will also talk more about Messenger and Messenger Kids and share some tools to help people identify negative interactions and set healthy boundaries.
PROMOTING SAFER INTERACTIONS ON MESSENGER KIDS
Messenger Kids provides several control and visibility features that parents can use to create a safer app experience for their kids—from monitoring who they’re talking to most frequently, to seeing a list of reported and blocked contacts, to downloading a copy of their child’s information.
- Parent Dashboard: features several tools to help supervise, guide and create a safer app experience for your child.
- Sleep Mode: parents can set a designated “off” time, and each day at the designated time, the app will “go to sleep” and not be accessible to kids during those hours.
- Supervised Friending: if opted, parents can choose to allow kids to accept, reject or remove contacts on their own while maintaining the ability to override any new contact approvals from the Parent Dashboard.
- Download Your Child’s Information: parents can request a copy of their child’s Messenger Kids information including their contact list, messages, images and videos.
- Digital Citizenship Games: in-app activities, “Pledge Planets,” that help kids learn and practice how to make healthy online decisions, stay safe plus build resilience in a fun and engaging way
SETTING HEALTHY BOUNDARIES FOR TEENS ON MESSENGER
Messenger offers a host of[messenger.com]tools that put you in control to create a safer space to communicate.
- Block: allows you to stop someone from being able to contact you, and Messenger won’t tell them that you’ve blocked them
- Restrict: enables people to limit unwanted messages without having to block or unfollow someone they know. Restrict applies to a user rather than a thread; for group conversations users will see a warning message letting them know the person they restricted is part of the chat.
- Report: report a message you’ve received if you think it goes against the Messenger Community Standards.
- Safety Notices: gives tips on how to spot suspicious activity. It shares ways to take action to block or report another account if something doesn’t seem right.
For more information please visit: https://messengernews.fb.com/
Produced for Messenger
