Our Chicago: Online Safety For Children

The U.S. Senate voted Thursday to advance two online safety bills. Both are aimed at making the internet a friendlier place for children and teens.

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If passed, the bills would ban ads targeted to kids and prevent companies from collecting personal information for anyone 17 and under.

Social media platforms would also be required to have a "duty of care" to prevent their products from harming children. "

"Less is more," explained Dr. John Walkup, the chair of the Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Lurie Children's Hospital.

If passed, the bills would ban ads targeted to kids and prevent companies from collecting personal information for anyone 17 and under.

"We also know that there are kids who are particularly vulnerable. Kids with anxiety and depression. When they go online, they may be targeted a little bit more readily and suffer a little bit more. But there's also a group of kids who have psychiatric disorders who actually get support to build on or extend or make their own condition worse. And so parents

who have kids with particular difficulties need to be extra conscientious," Dr. Walkup said.

Most kids who are pretty healthy can go online and "expose themselves to even some, you know, difficult challenging things and they have a reality sense and they're grounded within their family and within their peer group and they know, they know what's not good," he added.

"It's really those vulnerable kids that I worry most about, those are the kids that I see. Who go on and aren't as supported by their families, may not be as knowledgeable and carry kind of a vulnerability to the internet. Those are the kids who get harmed. And so for parents, it's really not just the internet per se but it's who is my kid, what are they about, are they struggling in any kind of way and are they engaging in the internet in a way that either helps them grow or puts them in kind of a much more adverse position."

Marshini Chetty is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and directs the Amyoli Internet Research Laboratory.

Chetty specializes in human-computer interaction and said parents play a key role in their child's safety and use of the internet.

If passed, the bills would ban ads targeted to kids and prevent companies from collecting personal information for anyone 17 and under.

"Modeling is a really important part of this. You as a parent have to be self-disciplined so you're setting up a really good environment for your family in deciding what's acceptable and what isn't."

Chetty encourages parents to talk with their children, "I think it's important for parents just to be involved. Just knowing what your kids are up to, how long they're spending on their devices, the kinds of things they're doing. If you're just having quick conversations about the kinds of stuff they're seeing on social media or what they're doing can give you a lot of insight into some of these potential problems that may arise later."

She added it's important that social media isn't everything your child is doing and that "you're encouraging them to have sort of a full life."