Help children in care browse online safely
Support care-experienced young people as they browse different websites and internet-connected apps.
Quick safety tips
Help your care-experienced child stay safe while browsing the internet with these top safety tips.
Set parental controls
Help develop good online safety habits by setting parental controls on the devices and platforms they use to restrict content, screen time and more.
Check-in regularly
Have regular conversations with your child about their online life, their favourite apps and how they stay safe to create an open space for communication.
Practise critical thinking
Use news stories, things they see on social media or scenarios to help them develop critical thinking skills when it comes to browsing content online and in apps.
Inside this guide
- Challenges for care-experienced children
- Benefits and risks
- How to prevent potential harm
- How to deal with harmful issues
- Activities to do together
Challenges for care-experienced children
Children with care experience benefit more online than children not in care. However, they also experience more risk for harm.
Children in care or with care experience also might have additional challenges while browsing, including:
- increased screen time and feelings of addiction to devices;
- greater likelihood to come across religious extremism or terror acts online;
- less stability or consistency in online safety education or understanding of potential risks and their impacts online.
Benefits and risks for care-experienced children
Browsing and using the internet is crucial for all children, providing opportunities to play, learn, develop hobbies, and find their voice.
Children with care experience are more likely to feel socially isolated, so these online activities can support their wellbeing.
However, the risks associated with internet are also often heightened for these children. The impacts they experience depending on multiple factors, including their care placement, personal history, relationships with their birth family members and past trauma experiences.
Benefits of browsing online
Finding support
Some children in care might struggle to share their questions or thoughts with their carers. The online space can help them find information or communities to find answers or support.
Supporting education
Most young people use devices to support learning and schoolwork. Access to connected technologies can give children in care consistency in learning and opportunity to achieve in school.
Outlet for downtime
Browsing online offer children in care opportunities to unwind and de-stress by engaging with a range of content and information.
Different experiences
Browsing online can expose children in care to a range of lifestyles and types of people, supporting a balanced worldview and connection to more people.
Risks of browsing online
Children in care are at greater risks of a range of harms across the 4 Cs: Content, Contact, Conduct and Commerce.
When it comes to browsing, they are most likely to experience content and conduct risks.
Content risks
Care-experienced children are often less monitored online. So, they are more likely to come across videos, images or text that poses the risk of harm.
The following are content risks that a child in care or who cares for family might face online.
If any child stumbles across adult content online, they might struggle to understand what they’re seeing. Care-experienced children are less likely to feel like they have someone they can process it with.
Without this support, they are at greater risk of normalising violent or abusive behaviour or unhealthy relationships. Becoming desensitised to this content can also make it harder for them to recognise when to take action against it.
If a child in care could previously browse the internet without mediation, carers might face a greater struggle to implement new boundaries.
Care-experienced young people are more likely to come across content online which promotes extremist views.
Without intervention on platforms which use algorithms, children face greater risk of falling into echo chambers. Echo chambers tend to amplify one point of view, shaping young people’s thoughts and feelings about particular groups.
Carers can really struggle to counter these viewpoints once a child has full accepted the proposed belief system.
Wherever your child browses online, they might come across fake news or mis and disinformation. Unfortunately, much of this misleading information can lead to hate against other groups and risks to health. It can play a huge part in shaping children’s worldviews.
As many children in care have previous internet experiences, it’s difficult to talk about how people might manipulate information for certain purposes.
Countering false information is especially difficult for children with inconsistent education placements. They might then overly rely on information from harmful websites and apps, increasing the risk of ‘fake news’ shaping their attitudes and behaviours.
Conduct risks
Many care-experienced children browse without parental controls unless they stay somewhere consistent. As such, they often have access to websites or content which can cause them harm. They might also engage in harmful activities.
Children often follow their curiosity, which can sometimes lead to harm. Accessing sites that feature graphic content like death is at the extreme end of the spectrum, but it does happen.
Care-experienced children are also at greater risk of visiting gambling sites or downloading potentially harmful files such as music or movies from untrustworthy websites.
Children often use shortcuts when it comes to security online — such as using the same password for every account or sharing passwords with friends. Without guidance or positive modelling of safe behaviour, a care-experienced child might not recognise the associated harms like identity theft.
Additionally, without consistent guidance, children with care experience might become targets of scams. Research shows that these children are particularly at risk of phishing scams. Often, these scams come in the form of clickbait stories or offers that are really too good to be true.
Following harmful links can lead to malware and viruses getting added to children’s devices, which can potentially harm an entire home network.
How to prevent potential harm
Remember that the internet is a powerful and incredibly useful tool for children and young people with care experience.
Even though you might worry about the dangers, it’s important to keep children informed without scaring them.
Explore the actions to take and conversations to have to help you support safe browsing online.
Actions to take
If your child browses the internet, you can use the following tools and strategies to support them.
Create an agreement
Work together with your child and their wider support groups to agree on boundaries around device use, including where they can use them, how they can connect to the internet and when they can use devices.
Set parental controls
Use apps similar to Google Family Link to set parental controls across devices and apps. You can set content restrictions to limit what kind of content they can access and when all from your own smartphone.
Connect with their support network
Children with care experience might lack trust in caregivers and develop an external support network, such as with school friends or an elder sibling. Carers developing a relationship with this external network often find out about issues before the child can discuss them directly.
Have regular conversations
Helping your child develop a good relationship with tech requires an open space to chat. Ask them about what they like doing online, how they stay safe (such as with reporting tools) and about updates like you would ask about their school day. Keep chats casual and let them lead.
Conversations to have
Helping young people build their critical thinking skills around digital safety and appropriate behaviours online is a continuous process. So, conversations should be part of everyday life and discussions.
It’s also more effective to have many smaller conversations rather than just one long talk. Talking ‘early and often’ will normalise discussion of online activity and make approaching difficult subjects easier.
Depending on their age and life experiences, when a child comes into your care, they might already have exposure to a range of inappropriate content. For some, it might seem normal. This creates difficulty in addressing the issues as a child might feel like they’re not harmed.
When it comes to talking about inappropriate content or behaviour, it’s best to use distancing techniques and scenarios. Ask them how someone else could handle a situation rather than applying it directly to them.
Helpful conversation guides
- How to talk about harassment and abuse
- How to talk about online pornography:
- How to talk about cyberbullying
A child who is digitally resilient knows how to protect themselves from harm or recognise actions to take. Because care-experienced children might not always have consistent messages about online safety, they might need extra support.
Help them build their resilience by:
- Defining what harm looks like: This can include becoming desensitised to inappropriate content. You can also talk about the impacts on mental health (e.g. feeling worried, scared or anxious about going online).
- Exploring the in-platform tools: Most platforms have reporting and blocking tools. Some have other supportive options too. Explore these in your child’s apps along with when to use them. Remind them that no one knows if they report them.
Explore more guidance with the Digital Resilience Toolkit.
Encourage children to do their own research and get second opinions from differing sources.
The following tools can help them navigate online information.
- Search for other sources of the information. Do other sites say the same thing or something different? Would most people recognise the websites or information sources? If something seems off, encourage them to come to you or ask questions if it’s safe.
- Fact-check with sites like Snopes and Full Fact. If they see something making the rounds online, encourage them to use fact-checking websites to confirm something is true before believing and sharing it.
- Find other points of view. If some people are saying the opposite is true, explore their sources. Seeing both points of view can help you and your child make a more educated decision.
If your child believes harmful information, it’s important to ask questions without interrogating or putting those ideas down.
Often, if an influencer spreads harmful misinformation, they also prepare their followers for pushback. So, avoid playing into that narrative. Instead, ask them to help you understand their point of view.
How to deal with harmful issues
If your child does experience a harm while browsing online, there are things you can do to help them deal with it:
- Report content. Encourage your child to use built-in reporting tools, reminding them that no one will know if they’ve reported someone. They should also tell you if they’ve come across something that shouldn’t be there. If necessary, also report to the police, Action Fraud or CEOP.
- Talk it through. Make space for them to talk while you listen. If something has happened, avoid interrupting them and panicking as this might shut down conversation. Ask questions where necessary and make a note if you need to. Once they’ve been able to fully share their experience, you can take any next steps to support them.
- Provide alternatives. If your child experiences harm on a platform they enjoy, encourage a break and suggest an alternative. You can explore a range of apps and platforms here.
Activities to do with your child
Help children with care experience develop safe online browsing habits with these activities that you can do together.

Get personalised advice and ongoing support
The first step to ensure your child’s online safety is getting the right guidance. We’ve made it easy with our ‘My Family’s Digital Toolkit.’