One of the problems I think with young kids online is that a lot of parents and teachers really seem to see the internet as a sort of game that kids play with their friends.
Like, I remember doing e-safety in school (and I was born in 2000, so this really isn't long ago) and it would always focus on two very specific scenarios:
A kid is being bullied at school and the bullying moves online.
A kid is contacted by somebody pretending to be a friend of one of their friends and agrees to meet them, only to find out that they are actually a 40 year old kidnapper or something.
I mean, I'm not saying that learning about that stuff isn't important, just that it is woefully inadequate for preparing kids for what the internet is actually like.
E-safety lessons currently work on the assumption that kids are only ever going to be talking to other kids on the internet and, if they do interact with an adult, it will only be because they are pretending to be another kid.
When in reality, your kid going online is less like them going to play a game with their friends in their room, and more like them wandering out onto the street unsupervised.
They are going to meet up with adults. Not because those adults are predators looking to ensnare your child, but because your child is currently hanging out in a public space where adults also hang out.
Not saying that's bad— kids learn to socialise by watching adults, there are plenty of possibilities for positive interactions between generations— just that schools should cover it better.
Like, I see adults on Tumblr a lot complaining about how kids in fandom culture especially tend to view them as 'creepy' or 'predatory' for interacting with them, and I can tell you that that is almost certainly because, last time I checked, schools are teaching kids that that is the only reason an adult would ever interact with them online.
There is no discussion on how to deal with online disagreements without things getting too nasty; no mention of how to recognise and not give into trolling; no talk about how to deal with the stresses that come from social media, not because of people being deliberately mean, but because of the natural effects of being constantly bombarded with depressing or worrying new stories (of varying accuracy) intermixed with touched-up images of people who are way more attractive than you.
Hell, one of the things my parents have been nagging me about recently is the importance of not posting anything online that could ge easily linked back to you and potentially off-putting to a future employer. That was never mentioned in school e-safety lessons, however, because it was apparently somehow assumed that nobody over the age of thirteen used the internet.
I'm just saying, a lot of the problems with kids online right now could be at least lessened if schools stopped acting like the internet is made up of a single chatroom populated solely by a kid's classmates and the odd pedophile.
