Digital Parenting Tricks: What should you do if your child receives a revealing photo?

Revealing photos or adult content is a tricky topic. We have prepared some recommendations to help you better handle this situation:

Work together with your children to understand how to respond to these situations. Teach them to ignore the messages, delete the photos, and block the sender if the person is unknown. If a friend is the one sending the inappropriate content, and that friend is insisting, (with text messages or other types of content on the same note), help your child respond: I am not interested in this, stop sending me this type of content. Even though, smaller children are usually bothered by this type of images, this situation might also be uncomfortable to older teen, as well.

Advise your children to delete it immediately, and not share it with anyone. If there is anything that makes the child feel uncomfortable, they should talk to an adult / parent. The consequences of having this kind of photos can range from nothing at all to serious; depending on the context and the identity of the sender, things can get more serious from psychological and legal points of view.

If the image / video is of a person the child knows (a friend, another kid from school, etc), together you should inform that kid and their parents about that specific content. If it were an embarrassing photo of your child, you would like to know about it.

Teach your child to think critically: What was the sender’s intent? How does that person wish to appear (cool, older, experienced, etc.)? What kind of an impact can that kind of content have on somebody’s mind? Think about how something that might seem funny can hurt someone else’s feelings. And don’t share it with anyone else.

This article is part of the Digital Parenting Tricks series for the Bitdefender Parental Control* feature. Bitdefender worked with a psychologist to create a cheat sheet for parents and offer them some guidance on how to deal with some of the most troublesome digital challenges of our time. Because we want to use technology to find new ways to stand up to this kind of behaviour.