Supporting Young People Online: 5 Practices to Build Together
Learning objective
After reading this article, you will be able to build five concrete habits with a young person, child, teenager, student: configuring privacy together, setting the stranger filter, recognizing the warning signs of a contact, talking about the long-term footprint, and above all creating the conditions for them to come talk to you when something is wrong.
A situation to know about
A young person receives a friend request from someone they don't know. The profile looks real: a photo, a few posts, some mutual friends. They accept. A few days later, the person starts asking questions: which school do you go to, where do you live, are you home alone on weekends?
Something feels off to them. But blocking seems excessive, ignoring seems rude, and they're not sure they want to tell an adult, for fear of the reaction.
This situation happens every day, and that last sentence is the decisive point: what protects a young person online is not surveillance — it's that they come talk to you. The five practices in this article build exactly that.
The 5 practices
Practice 1 — Configure privacy together, not for them
Default settings make a profile as visible as possible: posts, photos, sometimes location, accessible to anyone. A young person creating an account thinks about the content, not the settings.
To build together: at every account creation (then every few months) a side-by-side pass through the settings: who sees the posts, who can message, is location shared. The three baseline settings: private account on Instagram, contact set to "Friends only" on Snapchat, account suggestion to others turned off on TikTok. Doing the setup with the young person rather than for them changes everything: they understand the why, and will know how to redo it alone. The setting-by-setting, platform-by-platform detail is the subject of the next article in this track.
Practice 2 — Set the stranger filter
Full name, school, neighborhood, routine, "home alone this weekend": each piece of information is harmless in isolation. Together, they form a portrait the wrong person can exploit.
To build together: a reflex question to pass on — would I be comfortable if a complete stranger knew this? And a short, non-negotiable, explained list of what is never shared publicly: address, phone number, school name, schedule, parents' absences. Explained: because an understood rule is applied even when you're not there; an imposed rule, only when you are.
Practice 3 — Teach the warning signs of a contact
A profile with a photo, followers and mutual friends guarantees nothing: fake profiles are easy to create, and some are built to establish trust before asking for something.
The signs a young person should know — four, simple, by heart:
- The person asks insistent personal questions (school, address, when they're alone)
- They ask for photos
- They want to move the conversation to a private channel
- They ask to keep the contact secret. The maximum signal: an online relationship someone asks to hide from parents is never a healthy one
And the frame to set: declining a friend request is neither rude nor mean. Nobody has a right of access to their profile. If a sign appears: stop replying, delete nothing (messages are evidence), and come tell someone.
Practice 4 — Talk about the footprint, without dramatizing
A photo, a comment, a video: once online, it can be copied and resurface years later, an application, an interview, a relationship. For a teenager focused on the present, "in five years" is an abstraction.
To build together: the question before posting — would I be comfortable if my parents, my future employer or my school saw this?, and a periodic cleanup of old posts, done by the young person themselves. Add the reciprocity rule: you don't post a photo of a friend without asking. And apply it both ways: your child also has a footprint that you are building for them. Every photo of them you post is part of it. The adult's consistency is the best pedagogical argument.
Practice 5 — The golden rule: react without punishing
Blocking and reporting tools exist on every platform (Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, YouTube), the reported person is not notified, and there is no severity threshold to reach before using them: a message that makes them uncomfortable is enough. Pass that on.
But the decisive practice is on your side: a young person who fears phone confiscation or punishment will say nothing. It's the first lock on their silence, and it's the one you control. Say it explicitly, before any incident: "If something strange happens to you online, come tell me. You won't be punished, and we won't take your phone away. We'll sort it out together." And keep your word when the day comes. Many countries run free, anonymous helplines for young people and parents (France's 3018, Spain's 017, Bulgaria's safenet.bg: check your country's equivalent).
What really matters
1. Together rather than instead. Settings, cleanup, decisions: every practice done with the young person becomes a skill; done for them, it becomes a dependency.
2. The 4 signs, by heart. Insistent questions, photo requests, moving to private, requests for secrecy. A young person who knows them detects what no parental control detects.
3. The open door, guaranteed in advance. "You can come tell me, you won't be punished": said before the incident, kept during it. It's the most effective protection there is.
A simple method to put in place
This week: a tour of the privacy settings, together, on the platforms the young person uses. Private account, limited contacts, location off.
This month: a conversation about the 4 warning signs, not an interrogation, a discussion. And the "react without punishing" guarantee stated explicitly.
Ongoing habit: a regular, relaxed check-in about their online life, the way you ask how school was. The goal is for digital life to be a normal topic of conversation, not a topic of control.
What "good enough" looks like:
- Beginner: the young person's profiles are private, the never-share list is known, and they know how to block on their main platforms
- Intermediate: the 4 warning signs are known by heart, the "no punishment" guarantee has been stated explicitly, periodic settings reviews are done together
- Advanced: the young person spontaneously comes to talk about what bothers them online, cleans up their own footprint, and passes these practices on to their friends
An honest note
There will be unclear situations, for them and for you: even adults find some online situations hard to read. What matters is not having an answer to everything: it's that no worrying situation is handled alone.
If a young person reports something serious to you (threatening messages, photo requests, an adult behaving strangely), you are not alone either: youth helplines advise parents too, free of charge. Talking about it is never the wrong choice, at any age.