Protecting your family: children and older relatives

Online safety involves the whole family – from children to older relatives. Simple, thoughtful guides, without surveillance.

Who are you looking after?

Safety in a family does not mean checking up on each other – it means getting stronger together. Children need guidance rather than secret monitoring. Older relatives need protection from scams built specifically around trust and moments of panic. The guides below are written so you can go through them together, at the kitchen table, with no technical background.

Pick who you want to help right now:

Older relatives

Children

Protecting kids online
Setting up a child’s phone safely
Parental controls, platform by platform – TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Roblox and the rest.

When it happens to a teenager

Cyberbullying: spotting it, documenting it, stopping it
Sextortion and teenagers – blackmail with intimate images: do not pay, do not stay silent.

For everyone together

The family security check – the most important steps for the whole household, in one afternoon.

You do not have to fix everything at once. Start with whoever is most at risk – often that is an older relative being pressured by panic calls. Simply talking together about how the common scams work protects more than any app.

The simplest family tool there is Agree on a family code word. Anyone who calls claiming to be in trouble and needing money has to say it. A simple defense against panic calls and voice-cloned ones alike.

The scams that hit families

Panic calls are only one variety. How the whole range works, and how you spot them together, is in the scams section – especially deepfake calls and the “new number” family scam . If something has already happened, calm step-by-step help is in the emergency section .

Try it together The security test works well as a family exercise: ten real situations, ten minutes, and afterwards you know which of these guides is worth your time.