Case study: Carly

Tablets, games and privacy: how a Manchester mum got the conversation started

Carly is a mum of two girls, aged six and eight, living in Manchester. When her daughters started using tablets at school, she bought them each one for home. She believes building digital skills early will help them in the future.

The girls are only allowed to use their tablets at weekends. They mostly play games. But Carly had a worry. Some of those games let players chat with strangers. She wanted her daughters to understand the risks, without scaring them.

So she came up with a simple idea.

She set up her own account on one of her daughter's games. Then, sitting in the same room, she started chatting to her child as if she were a stranger. A couple of minutes later, she revealed it was her.

The lesson landed straight away. Her daughter could see just how easy it is for someone to pretend to be anyone online and ask for her personal information.

After that, Carly turned off the chat features on her daughters’ games. She also went through the privacy settings on her daughters’ apps, step by step. She used this as a chance to talk about why those settings matter and what they do.

Carly's approach shows that parents don't need to be tech experts to teach their kids about online privacy. A simple, hands-on demonstration can be more powerful than any lecture. By making it real and relatable, she helped her daughters understand the risks in a way that made sense to them.