Building Digital Balance: A Family Guide to Google's Safety and Well-Being Tools

When it comes to digital wellbeing, one of the most important things is to establish an ongoing conversation with your children about their online lives. There is no one size fits all; every family can develop strategies that work best for them. But having access to a wide range of tools can help you adapt those strategies at every stage of your kids’ journey. Here are some of the key principles for those conversations:

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.

Managing media in middle childhood (6-9 years old)

Helping Kids Build Safe and Smart Digital Habits

Parents can focus on helping kids this age explore safely by choosing high-quality experiences, setting clear boundaries, and teaching them how to recognize when something feels off.

There are four main strategies to help kids become resilient to online risks. We can:

Curate our kids’ media experiences;

Control who can access our kids and their data;

Co-view media with our kids;

and be our kids’ media Coaches.

DigitalSmarts

Digital literacy is a vital tool for education, employment and economic participation, civic engagement, and even health and wellness. It reinforces existing inequalities based on socioeconomic status, ethnicity, education, immigration status and gender. Given the importance of digital literacy skills to under-represented populations, MediaSmarts and YWCA Canada have partnered to develop and deliver DigitalSmarts, a digital literacy skills program.

Reality Check: The Game

On the internet, it can be hard to tell what’s true and what’s false—but we have to make a lot of decisions based on how reliable we think things are. In Reality Check, you’ll learn how to find clues like finding where a story originally came from and comparing it to other sources, as well as how to use tools like fact-checking sites and reverse image searches.

Data Defenders (Grades 4-6)

Data Defenders is an interactive game that teaches children and pre-teens the concept of personal information and its economic value, and introduces them to ways to manage and protect their personal information on the websites and apps they enjoy

Behaving Ethically Online: Ethics and Empathy

In this lesson, students are introduced to the idea that “hot” emotional states can make it harder for them to control how they act. They also discuss the concept of empathy and look at how digital communication can make it harder to feel empathy for other people. Students then read scenarios that portray two sides of an online conflict and consider how to resolve them, using their discussion to build a list of tools for emotional management and conflict resolution online. Finally, students create their own scenario and explain how it could be resolved.

Introducing AI

In this lesson, students learn that AI tools are computer programs that follow patterns instead of thinking like humans. They explore how this can lead AIs to make mistakes and importance of having humans supervise and correct them. Students practice creating “robot rules” and then design a "Trashbot" that will recognize and pick up trash in the classroom.

Alcohol Advertising Online

In this lesson, students their personal experiences with alcohol influencers and then analyze some examples of paid and unpaid influencer posts featuring alcohol. They learn about the CRTC Code for Broadcast Advertising of Alcoholic Beverages to understand current Canadian regulations and then explore the ethical and regulatory issues around regulating alcohol promotion in social media.