Learning for parents: New workshop aims to teach adults about online dangers

It’s time for Port Moody parents to sharpen their pencils and take notes.

A new initiative led by the Port Moody Police Department and Safer Schools Together is aiming to teach parents how to keep their kids safe online. 

The session, True2You: Empowering Parents, will inform parents about how some social media apps and video games may lure their child into a toxic relationship with a stranger, said Roselle Quinones, the police department’s victim services coordinator. 

“From a parental perspective, we don’t always know what’s out there,” Quinones said. “The way things move these days, the kids are a little more advanced than we are.” 

Empowering Parents is also the third in a series of digital literacy workshops the Port Moody Police Department has hosted since 2018. 

The first two sessions, which took place in 2018 and virtually during the pandemic, were primarily geared towards girls and boys — specifically how they could identify threats and build self esteem in the digital world. 

The sessions were also created in consultation with Carol Todd, the mother of Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old Port Coquitlam student who died by suicide in 2012 after years of bullying and cyberstalking. 

Todd also provided input into the latest session for parents, Quinones said. 

Although digital safety is taught to children in most schools, Quinones said she felt it was important that parents learn about new — and potentially harmful — technology.

“Oftentimes, parents will trust their kids in knowing how to be safe,” she said. 

“But I think we need to go beyond that and for parents to educate themselves to know how to help their kids navigate the digital world.” 

The rise of online danger

Money-motivated blackmailing has become a larger issue in recent years.  

In January, the Coquitlam RCMP, Port Moody Police, and School District #43 shared a release warning about a rise in sextortion cases among young people. And on a national level, the rise of youth sextortion cases rose by 150 per cent from between December 2021 and May 2022. 

There is no easy answer to explain the rise in extortion cases, Quinones said. 

But she added that social media provides a sense of immediacy where people may gain a sense of trust with someone they have never met in person. 

“When we are connecting on a digital platform, oftentimes, people equate that to having a real in-person connection and start to trust that person sooner than meeting them in-person,” Quinones said. 

The lessons for parents

The new workshop for parents, led by Steven MacDonald of Safer Schools Together, will teach parents about the most prevalent social media apps and whether they may have any hidden features that could be risky to children.

“For example, if there’s an app with a messaging component to it where [youth] can have a little chat room,” Quinones said.

“Parents will have to make an assessment if that app we want our children to be on and be ‘lured into a chat group.’” 

She added that the workshop will help parents decide when is the best age to give their child a phone.  

“If you aren’t prepared to say take away the phone, then is it a good time for your child to have a phone?” Quinones said. 

But setting those boundaries can be difficult, she said. One of the main goals of the new workshop is teaching parents how to have conversations with their children about the pitfalls of the online world. 

“My hope is to encourage families to have open communications with their kids,” Quinones said. 

True2You: Empowering Parents is scheduled for Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Inlet Theatre. The event is free.