Keeping Kids Safe from Sexual Predators Online with guest Christy Keating

In this episode of Brainy Moms, Dr. Amy and Teri interview Christy Keating, Founder & CEO of The Heartful Parent and former attorney specializing in the prosecution of sexually violent predators. Christy continues our discussion about protecting our children in an internet-driven world. She shares 7 strategies for keeping kids safer online, teaches us warning signs of predatory behaviors, and coaches us on how to talk to our kids and teens about  pornography and privacy. It’s an episode full of tips for parents of both younger and older kids. 

Read the transcript and show notes for this episode:

EPISODE 122
Keeping Kids Safe from Sexual Predators Online
with guest Christy Keating

Dr. Amy Moore:

Hi, and welcome to this episode of Brainy Moms. I’m Dr. Amy Moore here with my co-host, Teri Miller. We are coming to you today from a really nice Colorado. A little bit smoky, but the weather is perfect. We had an intense conversation on our last episode with Counselor Clint Davis about protecting our children from child sexual abuse. It was a really uncomfortable conversation about having uncomfortable conversations with our kids in order to protect their bodies and keep them safe. So, we posted a quick clip, a 60-second preview, on social media of that interview just as a teaser and we had over 6,000 plays in the first three hours that we posted that.

Dr. Amy Moore:

That is telling us that people want to hear more about this topic. I mean, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s so important. That’s why I’m super excited to introduce today’s guest to you, Christy Keating. Christy is the founder and CEO of The Heartful Parent. She’s a certified parenting coach, a certified positive discipline instructor, and a certified instructor with the Gottman Institute. She’s also a long-time leader and speaker at the Program for Early Parent Support and is a licensed attorney and former prosecutor with 20 years of expertise in the prosecution of sexually violent predators as well as an active member of the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Through The Heartful Parent sister company, Savvy Parents Safe Kids, Christy offers child safety workshops, presentations, and consulting to parents and professionals. She is here today to continue this discussion about keeping our kids safe.

Teri Miller:

So glad you’re with us. Thank you for being here.

Christy Keating:

Thank you so much for having me and thank you for being willing to talk about this subject because I often say to parents, if we can’t talk about it, we can’t protect our kids. It’s hard, but it’s important.

Teri Miller:

Well, before we get into talking about the work that you’re doing, which is so important, if you could just give our listeners just some quick background. What’s your personal story and what brought you to where you are today in the work that you’re doing?

Christy Keating:

Yeah, thank you for asking. As Dr. Amy mentioned, I am a licensed attorney. That was what I wanted to do. For a long time, I wanted to be a prosecutor and I wanted to help victims of all sorts of crimes. And I did work on all sorts of crimes, but eventually landed in our sexually violent predator unit where I was prosecuting really the most violent and most dangerous of the offenders that we dealt with in my office. That’s in the Seattle area, so one of the largest prosecutor’s offices in the country and a really large county in our state. And I loved, loved, loved the work. It was rewarding. It’s that type of work that has really high highs. It also has really low lows.

Christy Keating:

While I was working there, about halfway through my time, I became a parent myself. So, 12 years ago now my older daughter was born. As all parents know, that shifts and changes everything. Although I very much loved my job, I started discovering that I wasn’t able to be the kind of prosecutor that I wanted to be and the kind of parent that I wanted to be. So, I started exploring other options and I found that I really loved learning about theories of parenting and philosophies around parenting and how could I be the best parent that was possible for me. I had great parents myself, but I felt like I was kind of floating, if you will.

Christy Keating:

I didn’t know how to balance these different pieces of myself and my identity was suddenly really rocked. As I explored that, I found this program through the Parent Coach Institute and Seattle Pacific University. So, while I was working, I went back to school, got credentialed as a parent coach, and then discovered positive discipline and the work of John and Julie Gottman. In 2018, so it’s been about three and a half years now, I took the big leap to leave my work there and decided to open my coaching practice, The Heartful Parent, which I now call The Heartfelt Parent Collective because I’ve got some different pieces.

Christy Keating:

I work with parents one-on-one and help them address the issues that come up. I also have an online academy for parents. Then as you’ve said, I present and I use my experience as an attorney to talk to parents and professionals about, gosh, how do we navigate this really scary world, the online world, the real life world, and keep our kids… I always say safer because there are no guarantees of safe, but how do we keep them safer and deal with some of those things that really make us as parents worry. I’ve found a way to blend my two backgrounds and I love it. I’m so grateful that I get to do this work every day.

Teri Miller:

Absolutely. So, it’s still a jump, right? You’re prosecuting sexually violent predators and you know what their behavior looks like, but then it’s a jump to say, “Okay, now I’m going to teach parents how to keep kids safe online.” How did you develop that expertise?

Christy Keating:

In a couple of different ways, I was really lucky in that when I started The Heartful Parent, I stumbled into a community of other parent educators and parent coaches, many of whom might happen to be located geographically near to me and connected with a woman who had started the company, Savvy Parents Safe Kids. She was looking to retire, if you will, from doing that work. She found out about my background and she said, “You are the perfect person to take over this business.” So, I purchased the business, and in the course of doing that, I not just purchased the business, but I purchased a wealth of information and knowledge.

Christy Keating:

Then I knew that I needed to dive in even deeper and learn not just the nitty-gritty of the safety rules, if you will, and I’m putting that in air quotes, but how do I talk to parents about that? Because I’m not a fan of scaring the pants off of parents or with kids. It doesn’t work. So, I did a lot of reading, I spoke with other experts around the country, I subscribed to online… not online, periodicals that talk about this issue, and of course, as you mentioned, I joined the prevention coalition. Through all of that, I have just been so gifted with the wisdom and knowledge of other people and then I bring my own professional history into the work as well.

Christy Keating:

It’s been a really fantastic blending of my passions, which is keeping kids safer and preventing crime and working with parents to prevent ever getting to that situation where we have to go to court, right? That’s the worst case scenario, we don’t want to land there. I like to think of my work now as helping families keep their kids safer, healthier, happier, more whole, so that we never have to land in that courtroom situation.

Teri Miller:

I’m so personally curious about this and I bet a lot of our listeners are too. It seems really timely as we are ending summertime where a lot of parental rules and boundaries… In the summer, I know for my family, we get a lot more lax, we’re a lot looser with screen time and allowing kids to be on media because they have more free time. Then add on top of that, we’ve just come off a year where… Goodness! I want to say it’s been a school year and a half for a lot of parents where especially high schoolers have been doing school online, have been doing school remotely. So, they’re on screens constantly.

Teri Miller:

I mean, the media involvement because of education is just constant in their lives. Then we’re trying to limit that. I think a lot of kids are going back to face-to-face school, we’re trying to figure out how to navigate this as parents. I know I am. So, help me out here, how do I begin? How can I transition into this with my family? How can I talk to my kids about safety? And how old, when do you start this? When should I start this? I’ve got younger ones and I’ve got teenagers. Talk to me about that.

Christy Keating:

So many great questions packed into that right there. The first thing I would say is, yes, we’ve been in this really bizarre space over the last year and a half plus where… I know in my home I have a 12-year-old and a four-year-old. I run my business out of my home. My husband is in tech and so he is working from home. And we’ve all been on top of each other, and so some of those rules around screen time have been necessarily more lax. It has been the primary way that my tween can connect with her friends, which is developmentally appropriate and necessary. As you pointed out, Teri, there’s been the online schooling aspect of all of this.

Christy Keating:

My daughter didn’t go back to school until mid-April, so she was only in school for a little under two months this last year. That is hard for families as they look to the next school year and say, “Okay, how do we get back to a place that feels good to us as parents?” So, I think the first step is for us to recognize that it is worth the battle, if you will. Not that it has to be a battle, knock-down, drag-out fight with our kids, but that it is worth putting in the energy and the effort to make some of those changes and to start some of those conversations and to think about… One of the things I love to remind parents is we often talk about the internet as if it is a thing.

Christy Keating:

We call it the internet, right? It’s a noun. But in the reality, it’s a place that we go and it is a place that our children go. So, remembering that and wrapping our heads around that idea, I think, can often be the first step and help parents grasp why it’s so important that they do dive into these conversations and that they do set some boundaries whether their children are four or 14 or anywhere in between. Because if I say to a parent, “Well, would you send your child to a strip club or let them go to an adult sex shop?” They would look at me horrified and say, “Of course I would never ever do that.” But that’s what’s on the internet.

Christy Keating:

And don’t get me wrong, I love the internet. It’s allowing us to talk with each other today, it’s how I work with my clients, it’s how I do research. There are so many positive, positive things about the internet, and we have to recognize the dangers. So, if we wouldn’t let our children go to those places in real life, then we need to figure out a way to protect them from those places online. Step one is just to recognize that this matters. I think there’s a lot of parents that get so overwhelmed and they say, “The tech is evolving so quickly. My teenagers know more about it than I do.”

Christy Keating:

We’ve let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, during COVID or over the summer, and so a lot of parents throw up their hands and say, “I just can’t do it.” To that I say, it doesn’t require the expertise that you think it does. Something is better than nothing, and so diving in the interest of keeping our kids safe from the very real dangers online is, I think, really important. So, how do we do that? Well, that’s where it gets tricky, right? My answer for that will be slightly different whether we’re dealing with young children or teens. Overall, I would say the sooner that we can start having these conversations with our children the better.

Christy Keating:

If you have young children in your home as I do, setting up those boundaries, rules, expectations, and guidelines. I also like to infuse only morals and values around this as well. Setting that up early will serve you well as your kids grow into that tween and teen years. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, “Well, I have a 16-year-old and we’ve never had any rules. What do I do now?” Yeah, right. It’s never too late. It’s harder, I’m not going to lie to you. It is harder the older they are and the more freedom that they have had. Monitoring a 16-year-old is a very different ball game than monitoring a six-year-old.

Christy Keating:

I guess we can talk about that from both aspects. With a six-year-old, I guess my first question is, really why are they online? What is the purpose of them being online? Does your toddler or your preschooler or your kindergartener truly need an iPad? Can they really not entertain themselves any other way than with that device? It has become such a quick, easy thing for so many of us. We’re trying to eat a meal, kids cry, hand on the iPhone. So, at that age all the way up through those elementary years is a really great time to pull that back, try to stuff the cat back in the bag, so to speak, and really say, “This isn’t safe. Here’s some coloring or other options for entertaining themselves.”

Christy Keating:

They might not like it at first, right? There may be tears and there may be tantrums. Those devices are designed intentionally with the help of psychologists and psychiatrists to be addictive and to suck both our children and us into them in a way that it is really hard to turn it off. We get dopamine hits, which is the feel-good chemical, in our brains when we are on those screens and we get the next level on a game, or for our teens when they’re on social media and they get a like. That feels good to them. So, we have to be empathetic to our kids as we’re trying to pull back a little bit. But I would say boundaries, empathy, and just being really clear on the why with the little ones.

Christy Keating:

At that age, we can, for the most part, take the device away. Just to give you an example of how this might look in real life, with my younger daughter who is four, and this is really the way we did it with my older one as well, in those early years, she wasn’t on an iPad, she wasn’t on an iPhone or whatever phone is out there. We do continue to do Friday family movie night where we pick age-appropriate movies to watch. These days we watch one with the four-year-old, she goes to bed, and then we will usually watch a different one with the older kid. But that’s pretty much the extent of her screen time. Outside of that, she knows that really she has to entertain herself or find one of us to play with.

Christy Keating:

It takes a little more effort, but it’s well worth it because we don’t have those battles with her at this point. I hope I’m answering your question, Teri. But as they get older and they hit those tween and teen years, there are positives and downsides to that. The positive is we can engage in really good conversations with them and they can start to understand in a more real way what some of the risks are. As I said earlier, well, we don’t want to scare the pants off of them. It doesn’t work, their brains don’t process fear in the same way that we do.

Christy Keating:

We do need them to understand some of those risks, and we can share real-world examples with them of what those risks are and the importance of being cautious about our behavior online. We can talk in more detail about some of the specifics of that, but I feel like I just am throwing information at you right now.

Teri Miller:

No, I think that’s a great way to transition to the next topic. Let’s talk about what those conversations with our tweens and teens could look like, and what types of examples would we share?

Christy Keating:

Yeah. A few big key areas that we need to be talking with them about and that we need to be aware of. The first is pornography. Pornography at any given moment makes up approximately one third of the content on the internet.

Dr. Amy Moore:

One third?

Christy Keating:

One third of the content.

Dr. Amy Moore:

That’s almost unbelievable.

Teri Miller:

Like all the content online. Oh my gosh!

Christy Keating:

Yeah. It is an astronomical amount of content. If that’s not disturbing enough, the average age that children are first exposed to pornography online is somewhere between the ages of nine and 11.

Teri Miller:

Oh my goodness! It’s just sickening.

Christy Keating:

It is. Here’s the deal. We can argue til we’re blue in the face about whether or not pornography is acceptable content for adults to view, and you will get people on one side that will argue that it is and have all sorts of reasons why it is, and you will get people on the other side that will argue that it isn’t and will have all sorts of reasons why it isn’t. I don’t think we need to engage in that debate today. What I’m hoping that we can agree on and that your listeners can agree with me on is that it’s not child-appropriate.

Teri Miller:

Yes.

Christy Keating:

It is not content developed for kids. It is actually damaging to their brains, it can start to change the structure of their brains. It changes the way they view bodies and sexual relationships and consent, issues around consent. Their idea of what a healthy relationship looks like is being formed by what is very often media that is not characterized by consent, is often characterized by violence. The pornography that’s on the internet today is very different than… I mean, I remember when I was a kid and a friend of mine found a Playboy Magazine under his dad’s bed.

Christy Keating:

We’re like a million light years from that today. We really have to be aware that that’s the reality that our kids are being faced with. So, what do conversations look like around that? The first thing is we’ve got to be talking to them about bodies, sex, relationships, consent, and diving into those really difficult conversations. Parents say, “Well, it’s really uncomfortable. I don’t know how to do that.” And my response is, we don’t have the right as parents to say that we are too uncomfortable to parent. I don’t believe we have that right.

Christy Keating:

If we’re not parenting around this issue and we’re not sharing information with our kids, then what they do is they get curious and they hear things at school or stumble on something on the internet and they go to Dr. Google and the next thing they have been exposed to things that once seen cannot be unseen. So, we need to make sure that we are their source of information for all of those questions, even the really, really hard, uncomfortable ones, and we have to have conversations with them about pornography explicitly from a very young age, six, seven. That doesn’t mean we’re telling them exactly what pornography is in graphic terms of course.

Christy Keating:

But what it does mean is that we’re letting them know that there is adult content on the internet, it’s not safe for kids, it’s not meant for kids. Then we need to give them the action steps of what to do if they ever see it, if they stumble on it, if a friend shows it to them, certainly if an adult ever shows it to them because pornography can be a grooming tool. We need to tell them that they need to let us know right away. There is a book or two different books written by some women. One is called Good Pictures Bad Pictures, and the other one is Good Pictures Bad Pictures Jr for younger kids. These make it really easy to have these conversations with our kids around this issue.

Christy Keating:

So, that’s a really big piece of the internet. Then I think a second conversation with our tweens and teens or younger is really helping them understand the idea of that anything, absolutely anything that gets put on the internet should always be considered public and permanent and that there are no privacy settings that change that. The internet companies, Facebook and Instagram, and social media, they love to talk about privacy policies and privacy settings and it really rolls us into a false sense of security and the idea that, “Oh, if I just lock my account down or make sure my kid’s account is locked down, then they’re safe, then everything is fine.”

Christy Keating:

The reality is they’re not and those privacy settings are not privacy settings. They are, I think, better thought of as maybe exposure settings or sort of how far out things will go that you know of, and we never fully know. So, helping them understand that you can put something on the internet today, you can remove it tomorrow, in the meantime, screenshots can be taken of that, shares can happen. Anything that’s on a digital media, whether it’s a cell phone, the internet, even the cameras that… like an actual camera that is used, anything that’s in a digital format can be relayed and should be considered public and permanent.

Christy Keating:

So, making sure that they’re thinking about that, not just from that safety side, although that’s obviously critical, but also from the idea that the words they say on the internet and the pictures that they post on the internet and the messages that they send on the internet, those are forever, they’re forever. We actually had a family member that had a pretty rude awakening with this very issue recently. An adult, older adult, who is maybe as new to the internet as some little kids and didn’t really think about the idea that some things that were put on the internet were forever. We don’t want our kids to learn that the hard way. So, those are two really key conversations. Well, many conversations, but two big key areas, I guess, would be the way to say that.

Teri Miller:

Let me ask some specifics if I can. I’ve got 11-year-old and 12-year-old. To my kids that are in the middle, that are just transitioning into being on screens a lot more… My teenage sons, I think I mentioned my struggle with them is that they have been online schooling, they’ve had their phones so much more this summer. So, yeah, we’re trying to have those conversations about tightening the boundaries. But my 11 and 12-year-old are just heading into having phones because they are at that age now where for my convenience… I know as a parent, it’s like, “Oh, I’m not going to let them have screens. I’m not going to go there.”

Teri Miller:

My daughter who’s now in a dance company and she’s at the dance studio five days a week, I need her to have that. Now, she doesn’t have cell service, but she gets on the internet at the dance studio and then has through a little email program that we can text so that we can talk about her pickup schedule and what’s going on and changes in classes. Then same thing for my son with soccer. Here he is doing soccer three days a week. That’s what I need for my convenience. How do I enter into that and talk to them about these dangers? Even though it’s not cell service, they still have everything at their fingertips because they have that phone that functions on internet.

Teri Miller:

What can I say to them, what can other parents in this similar situation say to our kids that are just getting into that? Whether they’re seven, eight, nine, 10, but when you’re just starting that step of having a phone, what’s the conversation look like?

Christy Keating:

Yeah, great question. I’m actually going to answer it in two different ways. One, I hear parents say, “My kid is never having a phone until they’re 18.” First of all, that’s fantasy land. Second of all, I think this is another place where it’s our job as parents to give them those increasing freedoms so that when they leave our home at age 18, they can manage themselves and they have a healthy relationship with their screens and they know what content they feel good about viewing and what uses they feel good about using that screen or that device for. So, I’m not one of the people that say kids should never have devices. I am a big fan of graduated privileges with phones.

Christy Keating:

In the situation that you described, a phone that connects to the internet may be more important. There are a lot of parents out there that don’t need a phone that connects to the internet. So, there are some options before you get that iPhone or that whatever… I’m an affiliate for a company that offers phones that text, call, take photos, has a camera, takes photos, a calendar, a radio, and a couple of just other really super, super basic things like a calculator. That’s what my daughter actually has right now because she doesn’t need to be on the internet, but I like to know that she can get ahold of me. Now, she has cell service where she goes, so that’s why it may not work for every parent.

Christy Keating:

So, thinking about, is there an intermediary solution that might work for families in those earlier years is a wise choice. Then when we reach the point where an internet-connected device is either necessary as in the situation you described, Teri, or you’re just ready to start letting them have some more freedoms, I highly recommend that this is a two-fold process. One, that there are conversations, and we’ll talk about the specifics of those, and two, that parents aren’t just trusting the conversations by themselves, but are also using the parental controls that are available to them and monitoring software on those phones.

Christy Keating:

Depending on whether you’re in iPhone land or like Samsung or Galaxy or those Android devices will depend on the effectiveness of some of the monitoring software. So, it’s something to look into. But I think that in those early years, 11, 12, it’s completely appropriate to be saying, “No, no, no. I still get to control really closely what you’re accessing and where you are going,” thinking of it as a place, “where you are going on the internet.” That’s step one. Then step two are those conversations where, as I was mentioning, we’re talking to them about, “Look, it’s a privilege to have a phone and there’s some really great things about having a phone, but with privilege comes responsibility and here are the expectations.”

Christy Keating:

We can talk about this in a little bit, but I have seven cyber rules, the cyber seven. One of those is to use a cell phone contract with our kids. So, we’re really laying out for them what are the expectations, what are the guidelines, where will we let them go, what can they use the phone for, what can they not use the phone for, times when those phones are checked in with mom or dad each night, and having conversations about all of those. But not in a dictatorial way where we’re just like laying down the law, but where we’re actually talking with our kids about the why behind some of those rules.

Christy Keating:

For example, my daughter has to check her phone in at 8:30 every night and it is checked into our bedroom. Her phone sleeps in our bedroom. She understands the why of that is related to her sleep and importance of sleep. Tweens and teens, they don’t always like to have rules and boundaries placed on them, but they are more likely to be on board or at least to cooperate if they understand the why behind it. Remember when your kids were little and they’d just ask why, why, why, why, why with everything? And they stopped asking that question in the same way, but they still care about the reason behind what you’re telling them.

Christy Keating:

So, collaborating with them and making sure they understand that this isn’t just you being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk and saying, “You can’t get on your phone,” but that you have thoughtful, well-reasoned answers for them about the limitations that you are placing on them. Does that answer your question, Teri?

Teri Miller:

Yes. It’s super helpful. I’m sitting here taking lots of notes, so, yeah. Good.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Talk to us a little bit then about older teens. What do you say to the parents who feel like that’s a violation of their older teens’ privacy? What are your thoughts on it? Talk to us about your approach.

Christy Keating:

Yeah. If you have older teens and you’ve never been doing any monitoring, it is definitely going to be a more difficult conversation. I am a big fan of approaching tweens and teens with pure and utter honesty because, let’s be honest, they can see through the crap, like little human lie detectors. So, if we approach them with some made up thing, they’re going to see through it. But if we approach them and say, “Look, kiddo, I know you’re 15 or 16 and you’ve had a phone for a few years now. I’ve got to be really honest with you. I’ve learned a lot in the last whatever, listened to a podcast and I learned a lot from it.

Christy Keating:

What I realized is that your dad and I,” or your mom and I, or whoever safe adult, “maybe we didn’t set you up for success in the best way with that phone and we didn’t talk to you about some of the things that I think we probably should have talked to you about. I’m sorry for that.” Making that apology and owning our own mistakes and our own learning process with them, I think, speaks volumes to our teens. So, what we can say is, “I know you really love that phone. It is the way you connect with your friends, it is the way you connect with the world, maybe you have support networks for… ” If you’re a dancer, as you said, Teri, or a kid that’s LGBTQ+, or whatever is their community, they may have found that community online.

Christy Keating:

So, just ripping it away from them is not going to go over well. So, saying to them, with a lot of empathy and understanding, “I understand that this is your window to the world,” and especially during COVID really has been, “and I’m becoming increasingly aware of a lot of the risks that are out there for you. So, I’d like to dive in and have some regular conversations with you about this.” You may get the eye roll and you may get the, “Oh, mom,” or, “dad, that’s so unfair. You’re so unfair. This is so not cool. My friends don’t have to do this.” The response really should be, “I get it. If we’d started having these conversations when you were eight, this might feel more normal, but we’re going to do this because it is my job as your parent, guardian, grandparent,” whoever.

Christy Keating:

“I don’t want to go to bed at night thinking I haven’t done my job for you. So, let’s start talking about it. Let’s talk about pornography.” Chances are at age 16 or 17 kids already been exposed to that. By the time kids hit 19, 90% of them have seen pornography online. A very high percentage of those, both boys and girls, are watching it on a regular basis. We need to understand that reality and meet them where they are at. So, if that ship has sailed, saying to them, “I know there’s this content on the internet, and you may not want to tell me whether you’ve seen it or not, but I’d love to talk with you a little bit about it.

Christy Keating:

We don’t have to talk about what you’ve seen or haven’t seen or whatever, but let’s just talk about, does that feel good? What are the risks of it to your body and your sex drive and to the relationships that you’re having?” So, diving into conversations with them about consent. I have a 90 minute workshop that I give all over the country on how do we talk to teens and tweens about consent. So, having those conversations with them, talking with them about etiquette, right? Things like we don’t sit at the dinner table with our phones on, you don’t go out on a date…

Christy Keating:

It kills me. I haven’t been to a restaurant in a while, but you go to the restaurant and you’d see a couple sitting there on a date and they’re both on their phones and you’re like, “No, you’re supposed to talk to each other.” Talk to them about some of those things. Instead of going in with the, “We’re setting all the rules and we’re dialing it back and you can’t get on the internet anymore,” because let’s be honest, these kids are smart and they will get around you and they will get around your rules at that age. So, you got to meet them where they’re at, and instead dive into conversations.

Christy Keating:

If you’re at a restaurant and you see people on their phones constantly, ask them, “What do you think about that? Does that look like fun? Do you think that’s the way two people should be on a date?” And listen to them. That’s the other piece of all of this, not talking at them, talking with them and hearing what is their take on things. You’re going to get a lot further with a teen or tween there. Then you can set up some bigger picture ground rules, like, we don’t have phones at the dinner table or at the mealtime table. There’s a book out called 24/6 by a woman named Tiffany Shlain.

Christy Keating:

She takes the idea of the Jewish Sabbath and uses it in the realm of screens. Her family has one screen-free day every week, everyone, adults and kids and tweens alike. Maybe you say, “Look, we’re not on the phones before 8:00 AM in the morning and we’re not on them after nine o’clock at night.” You sent just some boundaries like that, but you, again, do that in a collaborative way with your teen so that they don’t feel like you’ve given them the world and then you’re taking it all back from them. Yeah.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Absolutely. All right. We’ve talked about from a child or teen side what they’re accessing and the importance of talking about access, but I want to shift gears and talk about what can happen to them. I want to hear about sexual predators, about the real danger to our kids, and what those warning signs are and what parents really need to know.

Christy Keating:

Yeah. This is so hard for parents. The reality is that there are people out there with nefarious intent, right? They don’t mean our children well and our children are the perfect target for them. And it’s hard to think about. When I was prosecuting sexual predators and I had to sit across from them and interview them and talk to them and listening to them and thinking, “My God! He’s describing my child.” That’s really hard. The reality is though that the rules and the conversations that we should have with our kids and the rules that we need to put in place are really not that different whether we’re talking about in-person interactions or online interactions.

Christy Keating:

The way they come about can be slightly different, but overall, the big picture rules and risks are the same. The first thing is to recognize that approximately 93% of all child sexual abuse occurs at the hands of someone known to our child or known to us or both. We’ve all watched movies and Silence of the Lambs and all these terrible things where we think about the stranger who’s going to kidnap her child off the street or contact our child online. Do those things happen? Yes. Are they the most likely scenario? No. The first thing to know is that we’ve got to keep our eyes open for the teacher, the coach, the priest, the neighbor, the uncle, I mean, whoever is in our circle.

Christy Keating:

That is where child sexual abuse or exploitation is more likely to come from, in person and online. Knowing that can allow us to pay attention to some of the red flags and warning signs a little bit more. That being said, and we can talk about those, it is important to acknowledge there will also be people unknown to our children that are using the online medium as a way to access those kids. There are of course social media, video games. A lot of times parents don’t think about video games, but those are often online multiplayer and there can be people from not within our child’s circle of friends that are online playing those games posing as children, which raises one of those important conversations that we need to have with our kids, which is not everyone on the internet is who they say they are.

Christy Keating:

And coupled with that the importance of always being who you are on the internet while not sharing personal information. So, making sure they know you never share your phone number, your address, the state you live in, the soccer team that you’re on. There was a terrible, terrible story a number of years ago in… I want to say Minnesota or Michigan. Several young boys that were playing online and they were befriended by this other young boy, 14-year-old boy, and they would have conversations during the games that they were playing and they would say something like, “Well, I’ve got to go. It’s time for my baseball practice.”

Christy Keating:

And this other person would say, “Oh, what team do you play on? I wonder if we’ll ever play against each other?” “Oh, I play on the whatever.” “Oh, I haven’t heard of that one. What town is that in and what days do you practice just so I know when not to contact you online?” It’s so easy to get information if our kids are not aware. So, suddenly you have a kid that’s like, “I live in this town, I play on this baseball team, and I’m at practice between these and these hours.” “Oh, does your mom drive you to practice or how do you get there?” “Oh, I walk to practice or whatever.”

Christy Keating:

So, in this story that did happen, it culminated with several of the boys being asked to send nude photographs of themselves as a way of… They were being blackmailed essentially. “If you don’t send me this, I will do X, Y, or Z.” Ultimately, one of the boys reported it. The individual was tracked down and arrested as he was on his way to this boy’s house and there were all sorts of items in the trunk of his car that were not good, not good. I don’t want to terrify anyone, but that’s like the worst case scenario. Is it common? No. Does it go that far? No. But we do see people contacting kids on the internet and pretending to be children as a way of gaining access to them, gaining photographs of them, exposing them to pornography as a way of grooming them.

Christy Keating:

So, we have to be aware of that and we’ve got to make our kids aware at least in ways that can help keep them safe. Yeah, it’s terrifying for us as parents. That’s why I do recommend, especially in those younger years, if you want to… My daughter likes to play Minecraft. Great. You may only play Minecraft with friends that I know and who have been to our home or that you have been to their home. That is the circle of people that you may be in contact with, not a friend’s friend, because we don’t know how that friend met that other person and if they’re truly an in real life friend, or is this someone that they call a friend online?

Christy Keating:

So, having some boundaries around that and monitoring that sort of thing online is important too. Limiting things. One of my cyber seven rules is we should not be letting kids on social media before the age that the website is designed to allow them on it. There are rules set up by the federal government that prohibit social media companies from allowing kids on typically before the age of 13. But we have parents that will set up accounts for their 11-year-olds or their ten-year-olds or allow their child to lie about their age online. First of all, I don’t think we should be teaching our children to lie about their age. That is a slippery slope in so many different ways, but it also is exposing them potentially to people that don’t have their best interests at heart.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Absolutely. Let’s go back. I know we’re focusing on online, but what did you say? 93% of sexual assault occurs within the circle of trust? So, what are the warning signs that parents can look for?

Christy Keating:

Yeah. First, it’s important to understand grooming behavior and the way that that often plays out. And this is actually true whether it’s someone known to our child or not. I think it’s also really important to acknowledge that when… My guess is that both of you and most of your listeners and most of us as adults think about a predator, we think about an adult man. That’s the vision that goes through our heads, right? Over 40% of child sexual abuse actually occurs at the hands of older kids, 11-year-olds, friends, older brother, or the babysitter, or whoever, another kid that lives down the street or some other child that is in their circle somewhere.

Christy Keating:

We need to keep that open as well and understand that whether it’s a child or an adult predator, they will identify who they want to target. It’s not typically a crime of opportunity in the sense that they’re like, “Oh, there’s a kid. I’m going to go for it.” It is a long, thoughtful, drawn out process, because it is in that predator’s best interest to gain the trust of that child and to pull them into essentially a cone of silence. So, they will identify a potential victim. Oftentimes, they are looking for kids that are not well-informed and clearly don’t have open lines of communication with their parents.

Christy Keating:

So, the more that you talk to your kids about sex and bodies and help them understand all of those things, the safer they actually are from predatory behavior, because what that tells a predator is, “Oh, this kid has an adult that’s paying attention, talking to them, and educating them. That’s not who I’m headed for. That’s not a safe place for me.” Understanding that is really important. That doesn’t mean that if you talk to your kid they’re guaranteed safe, but it’s helpful. So, they will identify the victim and then typically they will gain adult trust in order to gain access to that kid. You may see someone who starts to provide gifts and special attention or special privileges or wants to spend alone time with that child in a way that is outside the norm of that relationship.

Christy Keating:

So, the teacher who has the same student stay after school every day to help with cleanup, or the coach that wants… your child is particularly gifted and wants to spend time every weekend doing individual coaching with them, things where that child’s been kind of singled out. Then what they do is they start to isolate that child in some way and then they create this secrecy. They will often make the child feel special or grown up or sexy. If you hear your child coming home or your teen coming home and using different language than you use at home, talking about wanting to feel grown up or sexy, now, could that come from just our culture? Yes, it could, for sure.

Christy Keating:

But it would be a red flag for me because it’s after all of that feel good stuff has taken place, now the kid feels special, that the abuse begins and then threats start taking place. So, if we’re looking out for red flags and warning signs with adult or older children that aren’t safe, we’re looking for adult… I keep saying adults. We’re looking for people that repeatedly ignore `limits that we set, refuse to allow a child to set limits or boundaries, or constantly bull over those boundaries, insist on being physical with a child when the child doesn’t want to. We’ve all heard parents say, “Go give grandma a hug. Go sit on uncle John’s lap.”

Christy Keating:

What we really need to do is tune into our kids, and if they don’t want to do that, we should never be forcing them to do that. Someone that doesn’t listen to that and forces that anyway is not a safe person. Now, does that mean they’re going to be a predator? Maybe, maybe not. It might just be grandma wants a hug. But by teaching them not to do that and teaching our kids they don’t have to submit to that, we’re giving them autonomy and power over their own bodies. We should be looking out for people that are sharing age inappropriate information with children, jokes, comments, content on television or the internet or in media that is not meant for an 11-year-old or an eight-year-old or a four-year-old, or even a 16-year-old, but it’s really adult content.

Christy Keating:

And somebody that expresses or just seems to have an unusual interest in the sexuality of a particular child or the body of a particular child. Those would all be red flags that would be going off in my head and would warrant… I’m not saying you call the police if one of those things happen, you pay attention to all of it together. But it might be a time when you step in and say, “Nope. As mom or dad or safe adult, I’m about to set some boundaries here because this is not okay”

Teri Miller:

Yeah. This is hard, hard stuff, but it’s good. It’s what we need to hear. We need to be wise. We need to be armed and ready.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Absolutely. We need to take a break and let Teri read a word from our sponsor and then we’ll come back and talk a little bit more.

Christy Keating:

Great.

Teri Miller: (reading sponsor ad from LearningRx)

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Dr. Amy Moore:

And we are back talking to Christy Keating about keeping kids safe online. You have mentioned a couple of times that you have the cyber seven list of rules. Can you walk us through those?

Christy Keating:

Absolutely. I’m a big fan of trying to make things as simple and straightforward for parents as possible, especially as I mentioned at the beginning. This is an area in parenting, it’s really easy to get quickly overwhelmed and to just think, “I don’t know what to do.” I’ve mentioned some of these as we’ve gone on, but the first one is to think of the internet as a place and not a thing. The second one is to stop thinking, “Not my kid. My kid would never do that.” We love to think that we have a good “kid”, and again in air quotes, and that these safety mistakes only happened to, again in air quotes, “bad kids”.

Christy Keating:

First of all, I don’t like that labeling of children. But also even those children and teens who have those open lines of communication and know what they should or should not be doing are going to make safety mistakes. We all made safety mistakes when we were teens. Now, for me, the internet didn’t exist when I was a teenager, so I didn’t make mistakes around that, but I certainly made other mistakes. We have to understand that. We can’t prevent it or have productive conversations with our kids if we keep thinking, “Oh, my kid would never do that. I don’t need to worry about it.” That’s the second rule. The third one is to create boundaries around screen time usage.

Christy Keating:

I like to call it the golden rules of tech safety, which are computers and other devices, particularly in those younger years, should only be used in social areas of the home. My daughter’s desk is in our living room right now because we didn’t want her squirreled away in her bedroom on a computer all day long. Now, I recognize that that’s been challenging for a lot of families in the time of COVID. If you’re living in an apartment and now working from home and everybody is on top of each other, obviously there’ve been some leeway that has had to happen there. But to the extent possible, keeping those things in public spaces or in rooms with the door open where we can pop in and just say, “Hey, what you doing right on the screen?” Is really helpful.

Christy Keating:

Not allowing our children, tweens or teens to take their electronic devices to bed with them. So, the iPhone, the iPad, the school computer, the laptop, whatever it is really should be checked in at whatever hour you agree in mom and dad’s bedroom. I am a big believer that parents should follow all social media accounts of their kids and have access to the devices’ passwords and logins. In my home, as I said earlier, owning a phone or having a phone is a privilege and my daughter understands I own the phone and it’s my phone that she is permitted to use. If I cannot get onto that phone, then she can’t use it. That’s just the bottom line.

Christy Keating:

And that’s true for those older teens as well. Now, does that mean you’re constantly going on their phone and looking? No. At some point, privacy does prevail. But let’s say for example you suddenly had concerns that your teen was suicidal or something, being able to access their devices and monitor what’s going on with them might be really critical to their safety. Or you think a predator has contacted them, that can be really critical. Having a cell phone contract for tweens and teens. I do have one on my site that I recommend for parents. Then using monitoring software and parental controls, obviously with increasing freedom as they get older.

Christy Keating:

The fourth cyber rule is to be a critic for our kids. So, using resources like commonsensemedia.org. I’m a big fan of that one. There’s another podcast called Appropriate that’s done by a gentleman here in the Seattle area named Jo Langford where he goes through every single social media app that is out there and tells you the good, bad, the ugly, and makes age recommendations for that app. I think that can be really valuable for parents. When you’ve got a 12-year-old that wants to get on Snapchat, you can listen to a 10-minute episode and make a decision. Is this the right thing for my 12-year-old or not?

Christy Keating:

Number five is to model healthy behavior, right? We can’t set up rules for our kids and then violate them ourselves. We can’t tell our kid, you can’t have the phone at the dinner table and then we’re sitting there scrolling Facebook as we’re at the dinner table. When it comes to teenagers, driving and texting or driving and talking is a huge, huge risk. Well, it’s true for adults too it turns out. If you don’t want your teen on their phone while they’re driving, then you better not be on your phone either. We’ve got to be modeling those good, safe, responsible, and connected behaviors and demonstrating that in life communication and connection really does still trump online communication.

Christy Keating:

Number six is don’t be pressured into a purchase. I’ve heard parents say, “Oh, but all the kids, all the fourth graders have iPhones. My kid needs one too.” First of all, all the fourth graders don’t have iPhones. There are times in parenting where it is critical that we learn to say no for the safety of our kids. Also, I’m a believer that your children should never have better tech than you do. If you’re going to buy the new iPhone, buy it for yourself. Number seven, my final cyber rule, is to follow the COPPA guidelines. COPPA is a federal rule that stands for the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. That’s what I talked about earlier about not setting up social media accounts or allowing children to use websites before the age that that website says is when they are allowed to do that.

Christy Keating:

If we can follow those guidelines and have some of the conversations that we’ve talked about today, is it a sure-fire thing that your kid will be safe online or that they won’t make mistakes? Unfortunately, no. If I could promise that I’d be a very wealthy woman. But does it put you in a better position to keep your kids safer online? Absolutely.

Teri Miller:

Very good. Thank you.

Dr. Amy Moore:

We’re running short on time, but I want to give you a couple of minutes to talk about your Heartful Parent Academy.

Christy Keating:

Thank you so much. Yeah. The Heartful Parent Academy has really been a labor of love for me. I started it in January of 2020, so we’ve been going, gosh, more than a year and a half now. I started it for a couple of reasons. One, I had parents that were reaching out to me and saying, “I’d love coaching. I need parent coaching. I need help with whether it’s online things and monitoring or setting up that healthy family media culture, or I am having behavior issues with my toddler who won’t stop throwing themselves on the floor, on the grocery store,” whatever it might be.

Christy Keating:

They’d reach out but private coaching might not be in their financial budget. So, I wanted to give parents like that a way to get support from me and to get some of that coaching at a much more affordable price. I also started it because I had people from other parts of the country saying, “I want to see one of your presentations and I want to be able to hear from you or I want to be able to see multiple of your presentations. Can I watch it online? I don’t have an organization that wants to bring you in, can I just watch it?” And I had to say, “Unfortunately, no.”

Christy Keating:

So, I fixed that by starting The Heartful Parent Academy where I’ve taken all my presentations on everything from child sexual abuse prevention, online safety, positive discipline, ending mealtime battles when you’ve got the younger kids, talking to tweens and teens about consent, and I recorded all of those and put them in really easy to digest modules for parents. Then I also bring in other experts every month or every other month for a masterclass. I do a deep dive every other month into a subject like, how do you have family meetings? Or, how do we establish our own values as parents?

Christy Keating:

Then I do twice a monthly group coaching where any of the members can hop online with me. I do one that is all my parents, so parents from toddlers through teens, I do one for parents of younger kids, and then one for parents of the tweens and teens so that they get real-time access to a parent coach to support them through their challenges because I’m a big believer that we were never meant to parent alone. So, that’s the Heartful Parent Academy. If I can share, it’s only $29 a month. That’s a pretty reasonable price, I think, for parents. For any of your listeners, I have two different things that might be useful to them.

Christy Keating:

One, if they want to give that academy a try, they can go to my website at theheartfulparent.com, click on academy, and it’ll take them to the signup page. If they use the code, tryitout, all one word, that will give them $10 off their first month. Those cyber seven rules that we just talked about and we’ve been expanding on, I’ve got a downloadable handout on that for families. They can go to the heartfulparent.com/onlinesafety and they can download those cyber seven rules there. That might even be a great way to spur some conversations with their kids or their partners and get things moving in this regard.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Absolutely. We’re going to put all those links and the extensions in our show notes for all the listeners in case they missed that as you were talking. So, no need to worry about that guys.

Christy Keating:

Thank you.

Dr. Amy Moore:

We’re out of time and we really need to wrap up. This has been such an important conversation to have and we just want to say thank you to our guest, Christy Keating, today for allowing us to continue the conversation that we started last week with Clint Davis and really digging in with some actionable ways that we as parents, no matter what age of child we have, to help keep them safe online. If you want to connect with Christy, you can, like she said, go to theheartfulparent.com. We’ll put those extensions in the show notes and we’ll also put her social media handles in the show notes as well so that you can connect with her. She also has the Savvy Parents Safe Kids website as well.

Christy Keating:

Yeah. And come fall, they’re going to all be in one place, and I’m super excited about that.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Yeah. Okay, good.

Teri Miller:

Awesome.

Christy Keating:

Yeah. It’ll all be under The Heartfelt Parent.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Oh, okay. That’s the better spot to keep in our heads, okay?

Christy Keating:

Yeah.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Theheartfulparent.com. All right. Thanks so much for listening today. If you liked our show, we would absolutely love it if you would leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. You can also watch us on YouTube if you’d rather see us than hear us. And please follow us on social media @thebrainymoms. So, until next time, look, we know you’re busy moms and we’re busy moms, so we’re out.

Teri Miller:

See ya!

Christy Keating:

Thank you.

Show Notes

• For Academy Information and Sign-Up:  https://heartfulparentacademy.mykajabi.com/ 
  The code TRYITOUT will give you $10 off the first month.
• For the Cyber 7 Download, go to www.theheartfulparent.com/onlinesafety
• For anyone interested in a Gabb Wireless phone, you can get a discount using code: www.gabbwireless.com/promo/SAVVY  
• For monitoring software, Christy recommends like Bark, which you can access at bark.us.  If you use code BNDN7PF, it will give you a 1-week free trial and 20% off for life. 

Connect with Christy and learn more about her work and coaching program:

Christy’s Websites
https://www.theheartfulparent.com/

https://www.savvyparentssafekids.com/
Facebook Page URL
https://www.facebook.com/theheartfulparent
Instagram Handle
https://www.instagram.com/theheartfulparent/

LinkedIn handle
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christy-keating-j-d-a993a3110/