Resources for Parents - Sexting

What should I do if someone sends me a sext?

Half of Canadian youth aged 16 to 20 have been sent a sext (a nude, partly nude or sexy photo) that they didn’t ask for. Whether you call them sexts, nudes, naked selfies or just pics, if you receive an intimate image like this, it’s your job to make the right choice about the sender’s privacy. There is no excuse to forward a sext that someone sent you.

Raising Digitally Resilient Kids

The Raising Digitally Resilient Kids parent workshop outlines how parents and guardians can support children’s well-being and help them balance the risks and benefits of digital media. Based on insights from MediaSmarts’ research with youth, the workshop provides an overview of online risk categories and provides resources and essential strategies that participants can take to manage these risks.

Managing media with teens

While they’re not going through as much development as tweens, moving to high school at the beginning of this stage – and moving out of it at the end – can be stressful.

Sexting and youth: Confronting a modern dilemma

It’s hard to think of a recent digital technology issue that’s captured the public imagination more than sexting. This may be because it combines elements of the classic moral panic with more modern “technopanic,” provoking worries not just about the morality of our children – and, in particular, young girls – but also about the possible effects of technology on how we grow, think and behave. As with most panics, of course, the issue is substantially more complicated and less sensational than we perceive it to be, and while it’s unlikely that our worries about sexting will ever seem in retrospect to be as absurd as our grandparents’ fears about crime comics, MediaSmarts’ new data shows that many of our beliefs and assumptions on the subject need closer examination.