Most of the advice on talking to children about online safety focuses on what to say. This guide focuses on how to say it — because the conversation that stays open is the one that actually protects your child. A child who feels safe coming to you with something they have seen online is more protected than one whose parent has every parental control turned on but whose child has learned not to mention anything uncomfortable.
Rules about screen time and app access are useful. They are not sufficient. The genuinely difficult situations — a stranger in a game who has been friendly for weeks, a photo shared in a group chat, a message that felt wrong — happen in the gaps between rules. A child who has an ongoing, honest relationship with a parent about online life will share those situations. A child who has only ever heard "don't talk to strangers" and had a device handed to them will navigate them alone.
Not as a single event. The "online safety talk" is not like the "birds and bees" conversation — a discrete event you schedule and complete. It is better as a series of small, natural check-ins that evolve as your child's online life changes. Some good moments:
Age-appropriate framing matters. Here are some starting points by age group:
Focus on the concept of privacy and the idea that some people are not who they say they are. Keep it concrete: "Just like you wouldn't give your home address to a stranger on the street, we don't share our address or school name online." Normalise coming to a parent: "If anything online ever makes you feel weird or uncomfortable, you can always show me. You won't get in trouble."
Introduce the idea that people online can pretend to be something they are not, and that online friendships can be manipulated. You can use the phrase "grooming" at the older end of this range — explained plainly as "when an adult tries to become a child's friend online in order to ask them for things, like photos, that they shouldn't be asking for." Cover what to do if that happens: stop the conversation, screenshot it, tell a parent.
This is also a good age to cover group chats: "If something gets shared in a group chat and it feels wrong to you, it's okay to leave the group, and it's okay to tell me about it."
Conversations can be more direct. Cover sextortion — the practice of manipulating young people into sharing intimate images and then using those images as leverage. Acknowledge that this can happen even to people who are careful. Make it clear that if it ever happened to them, you would help them, not punish them. Cover the permanence of digital content — that images shared privately can be forwarded — not as a scare tactic but as useful information.
See our dedicated guides on online grooming warning signs and sextortion for Australian parents for deeper coverage of those topics.
This is the most important part of the guide. How you respond the first time your child brings something to you sets the template for everything that follows.
If you use a monitoring tool like Aunty Bea, tell your child. You do not have to explain every feature — but "I can see what apps you're spending time on and roughly how long" is worth saying out loud, framed as: "It's the same reason I know where you are after school. Not because I don't trust you — because that's part of my job as a parent."
Children who know they are monitored tend to have better conversations with their parents about online life. The monitoring is not the protection — the relationship is.
For specific topics to cover in the conversation, our guides on online grooming warning signs, sextortion, Australia's social media ban, and what the ban doesn't cover give you the grounding to have those conversations with confidence. If you are thinking about which device gives you better parental controls, our iPhone vs Android parental controls guide is a good starting point.
Aunty Bea helps you stay across your child's digital life so you have something real to talk about — without reading their private messages.
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