Today, Google Malaysia held an Online Safety for Kids and Families session with the media. The initiative is to encourage parents to start the conversation around online safety earlier and educate them on ways to better prepare their children for their online journey.
During the session, Nadia Khan, Head of Communications at Google Malaysia shared that more than 70% of parents allowed increased screen time for kids during the pandemic with 3 in 4 children spending an average of 1-6 hours online per day. Children are also turning to technology for daily activities from remote learning, to starting a book and learning a new language.
On top of that, children are also being exposed to screens at younger ages. A recent Kids & Families survey that we commissioned showed that kids as young as ten years old in Malaysia are getting online. Moreover, 72% of parents have proactively looked for information about online safety, whereas 30% of parents surveyed did not feel that their child is well informed about online safety issues.
If you are a parent yourself, there are some tools for you to help safeguard your children online. Here are some of Google's suggestions for you below:
- YouTube Kids - Comes with a full suite of parental controls such as parent-approved content which allows parents to handpick and curate every video and channel available to their child in the app. There’s also a built-in timer to help limit screen time by telling kids when it’s time to stop watching.
- Family Link - Allows parents to set digital ground rules to guide their children as they learn, play, and explore online, and make the right screen time choices for them.
- Be Internet Awesome - A program to help teachers and parents teach their kids digital safety. It’s now available in more than 30 countries and in various languages including Bahasa Melayu.
Speaking of Be Internet Awesome, it features an interactive game called Interland that helps kids learn about online safety in a fun and engaging way. It has helped millions of kids in areas like being civil online, understanding which websites are safe and responding more confidently to cyberbullying.
The Kids & Families Safety insights were gathered from an online survey all over Asia-Pacific. This includes Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, India, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan, from 16 to 26 February last year. The sample size was 4,500 parents with children between 5 and 17 years old.
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