As Christmas quickly approaches, millions of kids will be receiving their first-ever smartphones.
While this is an exciting time for young people, parents need to prepare for the dangers their child could face by using a mobile device.
Sean Clifford, the founder of Canopy, an app that works to keep kids safe, spoke with CBN’s Prayer Link to share how parents can manage the threats their children could face while online.
“Never before have devices been so central to the life of your average American child, whether it’s the education or their socializing,” Clifford explained. “On the one hand, we know that these devices are incredibly important for kids. On the other hand, they come with a host of challenges that we now understand better than before. They can be dangerous, harmful, and often times it’s resulting in anxiety and depression for our kids.”
He explained a major question for many parents is how to safely include the use of electronic devices for their children.
Clifford noted that with this new age of social media, children are encountering “unrealistic expectations” that can lead them down a path of destruction.
“Imagine spending much of your day seeing highly filtered, highly selected images that affectively show you that which you don’t have and that which is unrealistic,” he pointed out. “That’s setting norms and expectations which aren’t good for our kids. For the first time, your popularity, where you’re standing among your peers, actually has a scoreboard. And you can measure it in little likes and clicks and things like that.”
Clifford continued, “That just creates a sense of anxiety because where you stand is constantly shifting, which can also be problematic. We’ve seen in the numbers, rates of reported depression have doubled for both boys and girls … this predates COVID. This has been a long-term trend that’s really associated with the adoption of social media.”
He noted parents need to be aware of the easy access that children have to pornography when using the internet.
“Kids have never been exposed to this quantity of what we call ‘new pornography.’ It’s more accessible, it’s nearly infinite, and it’s, therefore, that much more likely to be addictive,” he stressed. “It used to be you had to look hard to find it, now you have to work hard to avoid it.”
Clifford explained Canopy can identify pornography on the internet, wherever it exists, and can prevent it from appearing on a child’s device.
“We’ve got artificial intelligence that scans internet traffic in real-time, milliseconds. We can identify nudity and pornography and make sure it’s not populating on a screen. Whether it’s a brand new pornographic site or a site that has mixed content … good and bad. We can pull out the bad and still make sure that you’re getting the good,” he continued.
Lastly, Clifford emphasized that parents can protect their child’s digital presence by adopting safeguards.
“When you’re giving them a device, you need to make sure there are boundaries in place. In terms of the rules you adopt in your house, but also the tools you put on the device itself,” he said. “For the rules in your house, we think it’s great to bound devices in space and time. You shouldn’t have your device be the last thing you see when you go to bed or the first thing you see when you wake up.
“Simple rules like this, that communicate to your child that there are a time and place for these devices can be helpful. They are amazing … we all love them and we know the power of things that we can get from them but we also need to make sure we’re using them in the right ways,” Clifford said.
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