October is popularly known as Hacktober among cybersecurity professionals and geeks. Every year we talk about new risks, techniques and updating digital systems to fix weaknesses before an attacker exploits them. Mostly, it is about corporate and fintech digital assets. But do we think about the most precious assets of our own- our children and their safety in cyberspace?
This Hacktober, we should assess which part of our parenting is still running an old version and vulnerable to the covert attacks our children are struggling to deal with.
We need not subscribe to fancy AI solutions, buy parental monitoring tools, or take a crash course on agentic cybersecurity. It is obvious that our children will face certain unexpected things on the internet and will use AI tools for help.
A 2019 UNICEF-commissioned survey found that a quarter of Bangladeshi children went online before the age of 11, and that 57 percent of 10-to-17-year-olds accepted friend requests from people they did not know.
A Common-Sense Media survey of 1,060 US teens in 2025 found that 72 percent used AI tools, and about a quarter reported sharing their real name, location or personal secrets with a bot. Younger teens trusted the advice more than older ones. Although I found no Bangladeshi data in this regard, it is still an interesting point to focus on. As parents, we must minimise the generation gap between us so that our children can share their ‘comfortable’ secrets spontaneously with us.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner found that the average age of first exposure to online pornography is around 13. The first encounters, however, are usually accidental. In February 2026, UNICEF, ECPAT and INTERPOL reported that at least 1.2 million children across 11 countries had their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes in 2025.
Although there aren’t any direct data about this in Bangladesh, the lesson is simple. We must prepare our children to protect themselves from these encounters before a stranger grooms them to do something unusual. Confiscating devices or detaching from the internet seems like protection. However, it teaches a child to hide the next incident from parents.
A study on problematic phone use found that a better parent-child relationship reduced dependency on phones, partly by lowering loneliness and the urge to escape. A phone is often not the root of the problem but an exit. A child who feels lonely, pressured or unheard will reach for the screen the way anyone reaches for a place that feels easier than home. Our screen time also affects the relationship. In a study of Indonesian teenagers, parents who ignored them to use their phones, a habit researchers call phubbing, predicted more problematic phone use in their children.
So, we also need to correct our habits and be more emotionally connected to our children. When our child tells us about something awkward they have faced, we should thank them and actively listen to them before doing anything else.
Researchers at Penn State suggest parents should not covertly monitor their children. Secret surveillance damages interpersonal trust. So, transparency is the key here. We should clearly tell our child what they can watch and why.
Commercial content restriction and monitoring solutions available in the market, however, are not a substitute for healthy parent-child relationships. So, we can develop playful family agreements based on our family norms and values, such as never sharing our secrets, location or photos with a stranger or an AI chatbot.
Keep in mind that we have less control over corporate social media and online content. At most, we can voice our concerns to policymakers so that they take necessary steps to mitigate these. Moreover, our initiatives cannot change a society that encourages people to gain money and fame at any cost.
Like martial arts, our initiatives teach our children self-defence while they gather their answers from the sea of information on the internet and from AI tools. Teaching them how to do self-defence without unnecessary fighting and bleeding.
The updates we need as parents are free, and they require an emotionally connected conversation with our children and kids.
The writer is a Sub-Editor, Daily TIMES of Bangladesh
