Help children in care socialise safely online
See how you can support care-experienced children’s safe online interactions with others.
Quick safety tips
Help your child interact safely in online communities with these 3 quick tips.
Use supervision tools
Popular social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram all have parental supervision tools for teen accounts that you can use.
Balance screen time
Encourage children to balance passive activities like scrolling and viewing with other activities like learning and creating.
Talk about behaviour
Discuss healthy and unhealthy behaviours in the digital space — including how they should act and how others should treat them.
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
Care-experienced children who socialise online might experience many benefits. This is especially true if they need to move around a lot, leaving offline friends behind.
The online space lets them stay connected with family, friends and communities, which can support their wellbeing. However, it also presents its own unique challenges for these children.
Children and young people with care experience might focus their attention on online spaces for stable socialisation. While a lot of this connection is likely positive, some might be harmful.
Unfortunately, because they might lack stability in offline relationships, they might struggle to move past harmful connections. This could be due to a fear of losing that stability.
Additionally, children in this situation might put all their energy into online relationships, ignoring offline relationships which might be temporary.
Lastly, children in care who rely on this online relationships might be at greater risk of grooming and exploitation from abusers who recognise the deep attachment the young person has to them.
As a way to connect with others online, a care-experienced child might offer up private or personal information to people they consider friends. This might relate to wanting to find connection with others who have similar experiences.
A child with care experience might also have minimal online safety education, or knowledge that is inconsistent. So, they might not understand what personal information actually is and why they need to keep it private.
Learning difficulties and disabilities can also make it more difficult for children to understand this.
Benefits and risks for care-experienced children
Interacting with others online through social media or other platforms is an important part of young people’s lives. This is often more true for children and young people with care experience.
From finding people with similar experiences to engaging with supportive communities, care-experienced children benefit from these social interactions in many ways. However, inconsistent messaging around online safety or potential harms can leave them open to greater risk.
Explore the benefits and risks of socialising online for care-experienced children to help support their safety online.
Benefits of gaming online
Keeping relationships
Socialising online can help children in care overcome fragmented relationships between them and their birth families. It can help them maintain healthy, positive relationships even when apart.
Supporting wellbeing
Connecting with positive communities online can help children with care experience reduce feelings of isolation — both physically and psychologically — as they become independent young people.
Finding community
Care-experienced children might face feelings of isolation and loneliness, which social spaces online can help counter. They can find community and support from a range of sources.
Creating new things
Video-sharing platforms let young people get creative with their own content creation. This can also help them find a community of people with similar experiences or interests.
Risks of socialising with others online
When it comes to socialising online, children in care might face content, conduct and contact risks.
Remember that not all risk means harm, so it’s important to have conversations with them about taking action against risks to avoid harm.
Content risks
Content risks in social spaces might look like inappropriate videos, images or text that a child could reasonably come across online. It doesn’t necessarily have to target them, but could target someone else or a group of people.
Children in care are generally at greater risk for abuse online, which is a conduct risk outlined below. However, they can also encounter hateful or abusive content on social platforms.
This could look like a social media post speaking out against an ethnic group or a video spreading hateful misinformation against a gender. If your child views and engages with the content, the algorithm might continue to suggest it.
Without recognising that it’s happening, children can easily fall into an echo chamber. They might also fall into habits of doomscrolling. Both of these things can have very real negative impacts on their mental health.
Vulnerable children are at greater risk of online scams due to multiple factors. While many scams seek to steal money from victims, this isn’t always the case.
If a care-experienced teen has access to finances through online banking or other forms, they are at greater risk. However, abusers might also extort sexual images from teens. This is also a contact risk.
If they are victims of sextortion, abusers might demand payment under threat of releasing nude images of the victim. Or, they might demand more images under the same threat.
Unfortunately, not all children who are victims of sextortion have provided nude images. With the advent of deepfakes, some might create believable sexual images of the child, using that to extort them.
Contact risks
Contact risks can come from people a child knows as well as from strangers. This often occurs through private messages but can start off in comment sections or other public forums.
Grooming is generally thought of as sexual in nature. However, abusers can groom children and young people for other purposes.
A child with care experience often faces social isolation, a lack of consistent guidance and/or financial limitations. If they share these feelings with people online, they could become targets.
- Sexual purposes: An abuser might groom a vulnerable child to get sexual images or to eventually meet up in person. Often, groomers will first develop a trusting friendship with the victim before it becomes sexual. Learn more about this form of grooming here.
- Criminal purposes: Organised Criminal Gangs (OCGs) target children they see as vulnerable in some way. If a child rarely has a parent at home or is part of a family which struggles financially, OCGs will prey on this. They can contact children on social media and other digital spaces. Learn more about this form of grooming (County Lines) here.
- Extremist purposes: Adults or young people within extremist groups might offer companionship to care-experienced children who feel isolated and lonely. Once they’ve developed a close friendship with the victim, they are better able to influence and radicalise the young person. Learn more about this form of grooming here.
Regardless of the form grooming takes, remember that it usually starts off as a friendship and takes time to lead to harm. So, it’s important to keep on top of who children talk to online.
Almost half of all children with care experience say they have been victims of cyberbullying.
Cyberbullying can come from people a child knows as well as those they don’t. The main difference between offline bullying and online bullying is the fact that it’s often inescapable. It can follow them from school to their favourite online spaces. It’s also often accompanied by offline bullying.
We know that children in care benefit plenty for socialising online. However, if the spaces they enjoy socialising online also contain elements of cyberbullying, it sours that experience.
If they fear that access to these spaces or their device will be taken away, they are more likely to keep that experience to themselves.
Conduct risks
Conduct risks refer to actions that children or young people take while socialising online. This can include using inappropriate apps or language.
Some social platforms require users to be 18 or older. However, these spaces rarely verify the age of its users, so minors can access them easily. This means they’re like to come across adult content that puts them at risk of harm.
Websites like 4chan and the now-closed Omegle have minimal restrictions when it comes to viewing graphic adult content. Even sites like Reddit and X, which have an age requirement of 13+, allow adult content in certain spaces. Generally, simply lying about your age will get you through.
If a child feels they are more mature than they are, they might not see the harm of accessing this content. Additionally, if they have experience accessing inappropriate content, carers will struggle to implement new restrictions.
Care-experienced children who socialise more online than off might adopt language or behaviours common in those spaces. They might mistake a cruel comment as an ‘edgy’ joke, failing to recognise the negative behaviour they’re spreading.
This might normalises the behaviour in their eyes, making it less likely they’d take action against others showing the same. Additionally, abusing or bullying others can lead to bans from the platforms they enjoy, removing any benefits.
How to prevent potential harm
Children and young people in your care will grow older and have increasing expectations as apps, trends and risks rapidly evolve. Safeguarding them requires communication, relationship skills and technical know-how.
Stay updated on the digital landscape through ongoing training and research to enhance your safeguarding efforts.
Explore practical actions and conversations to have below to keep online socialising positive.
Actions to take
If your child socialises online in different spaces, you can use the following tools and strategies to keep those experiences positive.
Use family tools
TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram have teen accounts as well as family centres that you can use to manage who they talk to, how much time they spend scrolling and more.
Review reporting tools
Help your child take control of their safety while socialising by reviewing tools they can use to report, block and mute — and discuss why and when to use them.
Set screen times
Help children avoid 'doomscrolling' or other forms of passive screen time by setting limits either in-app, on devices or by using external timers.
Set boundaries
Create screen-free zones at home to limit the chances of them communicating with harmful people. An example is storing their smartphone overnight.
Conversations to have
Discussing healthy behaviours and ways to stay safe can help children with care experience develop digital resilience. These are skills which they can use to navigate potential risks online to avoid harm.
Whether they use social media apps, video-sharing platforms or online forums, talk to your child about the places they socialise. Ask them about the platform’s concept, the pages/spaces they follow and what advice they would give to a new user who wants to avoid hate, abuse or general negativity.
Explore why they enjoy those communities, who they talk to, whether they’ve made any friends and if they engage in any similar communities.
Remember to approach conversations from the perspective of curiosity rather than interrogation.
While you don’t want to scare children from engaging in positive spaces, you do want to make them aware of the potential harms online.
You can lead these discussions by brainstorming potential harms together and what they could do minimise the chance of being harmed. For other harms they might not come up with themselves, introduce them in the same way and ask them about potential solutions.
Involving them in the choices around their safety not only involve them in the decision-making, but also makes the actions more memorable. So, they’re less likely to forget how or when to take action.
Ensure your child knows how to treat other people and what treatment to expect from others. Explore the internet manners guide for advice on what positive behaviour looks like.
Encourage them to block anyone who is hateful or hurtful towards them along with anyone who pressures them to do anything. Empower them to put themselves first when it comes to their wellbeing and mental health.
How to deal with harmful issues
If your child does experience an online harm while they engage with social communities online, remember to do the following things.
- Report content and block users. Show your child how to block and report users, and encourage them to do so whenever someone makes them feel upset or uncomfortable. You should also take screenshots as evidence wherever possible, especially if you need to report people to your child’s school or the police.
- Suggest alternatives. If your child experiences harm on platforms with older audiences, suggest alternatives. TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram all have teen accounts making them a little safer than platforms like Reddit or X. Message boards on Childline and the Ditch the Label forums are better alternatives for safe, moderated experiences.
- Encourage breaks (and ways to fill in that time). If excessive screen time has led to harm, you might need to set stricter screen time limits. Or, you might want to designate particular days as no-screen days. However, if you do the latter, make sure you provide other activities to fill the time such as going somewhere together or joining a community event.
Activities to do with your child
Support your child’s socialisation online 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.’