by Jenna Payette
Cyber Smart Parenting: Why Raising Digitally Resilient Kids Starts Long Before a Crisis
Every parent has had the moment: handing a child their first phone, tablet, or school-issued Chromebook, and wondering if they’re doing enough to keep them safe once the screen lights up.
For cybersecurity professionals Chad Rychlewski and Kay David, those moments became the conversations they were having everywhere they went. At Little League games. Family dinners. Birthday parties. Parents kept asking the same questions: How do I know if my child is safe online? Am I already behind?
Those conversations eventually became their book, Cyber Smart Parenting: Protecting Your Child in the Digital Age.
“Anytime I tell someone I’m in cybersecurity, they’ve got 10 or 20 questions,” Rychlewski says. “You find yourself having the same conversation with multiple parents… we have to be able to make this scale a bit better.”
David noticed something deeper.
“There are a lot of smart, loving parents that didn’t necessarily feel clueless,” she says. “They just felt unsupported. The security world wasn’t really speaking ‘family.’”
During their conversation on the Where Parents Talk podcast with host Lianne Castelino, both experts made one point abundantly clear: protecting children online isn’t primarily about technology. It’s about preparing children to navigate technology long before they encounter a problem.
Why Digital Safety Starts With Conversations—Not Parental Controls
The Most Effective Online Protection Is the Child, Not the Device
Parents often assume digital safety begins with stronger passwords, stricter parental controls, or more sophisticated monitoring software. Those tools certainly have their place. But David believes they’re only one layer of protection.
“When they understand why something is risky, they make better choices—even when no one’s watching,” she explains. “Awareness scales better than just technical parental controls.”
In other words, children eventually leave the family Wi-Fi.
They’ll use friends’ phones. School computers. Public networks. They’ll create accounts their parents don’t know about.
The one thing that follows them everywhere is what they understand. That’s why Rychlewski never waited for a certain birthday before introducing digital safety to his own son.
“As soon as they want to,” he says, recalling conversations that began around kindergarten when schools first started handing out devices. “These kids are really just being thrown right into it… I wanted to make sure that when my son was given that device, he had some context around it, and it wasn’t just a good luck.”
Like teaching a child to cross the street, digital safety isn’t one conversation. It’s a skill that’s built over time.
The Hidden Digital Risks Most Parents Never See
Why Protecting Personal Information Matters More Than You Think
When parents imagine online dangers, they often picture dramatic worst-case scenarios. The reality is usually quieter.
Every school registration, educational app, online game, and account creation asks families to hand over personal information. Names. Birthdates. Addresses. Photos.
Much of it is collected without parents ever knowing where that information ultimately ends up.
“Parents don’t know where the data is going, and they don’t know all the ramifications of that,” Rychlewski says.
One of the simplest protective measures he recommends has nothing to do with screen time.
Lock your child’s credit.
“Locking their credit is going to put a huge firewall between the bad guys and your child’s identity,” he explains. “If they do get that data, they’re not going to be able to open a credit card with it.”
The same long-term thinking applies to something far more common: sharing photos.
In an era of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and endlessly replicable images, today’s innocent family photo may have consequences years from now.
“There’s a lot of manipulation that can happen with pictures,” Rychlewski says. “Does your child want them online? They don’t know yet. Will they have an opinion about that when they’re 18? Probably.”
David offers an even simpler rule.
“Don’t share anything you wouldn’t want to be shown in a headline in the news,” she says. “If it’s online, it’s online forever.”
Why Gaming May Be Your Child’s Biggest Social Network
The Conversations Parents Don’t Realize Are Happening
Many parents think of video games as entertainment. Increasingly, they’re social media platforms.
“Every game has a chat in it,” Rychlewski says, pointing to platforms like Roblox and Discord that have repeatedly made headlines for chat-related safety concerns.
A child may appear to be quietly playing in the family room while simultaneously carrying on conversations with complete strangers.
Voice chat introduces another layer of complexity.
“It is possible that, unfortunately, they might be getting groomed by a stranger,” David says. “Or they might be hearing conversations or noises in the background that maybe they shouldn’t necessarily be ready to hear.”
Unlike text messages, live voice conversations often happen beyond parents’ awareness—and with far less moderation.
For many families, the greatest online risk isn’t what children are looking at. It’s who they may be talking to.
Why Trust Is Your Child’s Best Cybersecurity Tool
Building a Relationship They Can Turn to Before Something Goes Wrong
As children grow older, monitoring every device becomes impossible.
The goal, David says, shouldn’t be creating perfectly controlled technology. It should be creating a relationship where children feel safe admitting mistakes.
“Digital footprints are similar to physical fingerprints,” she explains. “You’re leaving little tracks behind. It doesn’t always mean it’s a bad thing, but it’s something to be aware of.”
That philosophy inspired one of the book’s most practical features: a family cyber agreement designed to establish shared expectations—not just for children, but for parents as well.
“We wanted to take that multi-layered approach when it comes to cyber defense with large-scale enterprises and make it more tactical for a family,” David says.
Rather than relying on fear, the agreement encourages ongoing conversations about responsibility, privacy, and trust.
Because when something inevitably does go wrong, children are far more likely to seek help if they expect support instead of punishment.
Raising Cyber-Smart Kids Starts With Being Present
You Don’t Need to Be a Cybersecurity Expert to Protect Your Child
For parents who feel overwhelmed by rapidly changing technology, both authors offer reassuring advice.
Start with curiosity.
Ask your child what apps they use. Ask what digital safety means to them. Ask them to explain how they choose passwords.
The goal isn’t to quiz them. It’s to understand what they already know—and what they don’t.
Above all, David wants parents to remember that digital resilience isn’t built through technical expertise. “You actually don’t need to be technical,” she says. “You just need to be present.”
The safest children, she believes, aren’t necessarily the ones with the strictest rules or the most sophisticated parental controls. “They’re the ones who know they can come to their parents before something like a crisis happens.”
In a world where technology continues to evolve faster than families can keep up, that may be the most powerful form of cybersecurity any parent can provide.
Related links
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