How do you raise safe, confident kids in a world of gaming chats, AI tools, social media, and constant connectivity?

In this episode of the Where Parents Talk podcast, host Lianne Castelino speaks to cybersecurity professionals Chad Rychlewski and Kae David, who share expert, practical advice from their book Cyber Smart Parenting. As both industry insiders, they translate enterprise-level cybersecurity strategies into realistic steps families can use at home.

You’ll hear:

1. Why digital safety conversations should begin in kindergarten
2. The risks of oversharing photos in the age of AI
3. How gaming voice chats expose children to strangers
4. Why locking your child’s credit protects against identity theft
5. How to talk to teens about their digital footprint without shame
6. The importance of family digital contracts
7. Why being present matters more than being technical

Instead of fear, this conversation focuses on empowerment. The safest kids aren’t the most restricted — they’re the ones who feel safe coming to their parents before a crisis happens.

This podcast is for parents, guardians, teachers and caregivers to learn proven strategies and trusted tips on raising kids, teens and young adults based on science, evidenced and lived experience.

You’ll learn the latest on topics like managing bullying, consent, fostering healthy relationships, and the interconnectedness of mental, emotional and physical health.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. whereparentstalk.com

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence, and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guests today are both cybersecurity professionals. Chad Rychlewski has worked in this space for more than 15 years.

He's also a speaker and an author, as well as a father of two. Kae David advises global firms on cybersecurity issues and is also an author.

Together, Chad and Kay are the co authors of Cyber Smart Protecting youg Child in the Digital Age. Chad joins us today from Durham, North Carolina and Kay joins us from Baltimore, Maryland. Great to have you both. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thank you so much. Excited to be here.

Well, and it's a topic that's ever evolving. It feels like as soon as you figured it out to some degree, there are new rules the very next second. So certainly always relevant.

You both work in cybersecurity.

What was the moment that you realized that parents really were asking for help that could no longer be ignored and that you were maybe able to provide them?

Yeah, so I'll take this one. So with the, the four and the eight year old, we have a lot of outside of school activities, so baseball, little league. I was talking to parents.

Basically anytime I tell someone I'm in cyber security, they've got 10, 20 questions and you find yourself having the same conversation with multiple parents. So that was it right there where we, we said we have to be able to make this scale a bit better.

I don't mind having the conversations at all, but it's great to have the book out there. To the folks that I can't have that one on one conversation with where they can go dissect it a little bit more.

Kay, how about yourself?

Yeah, I wish I could say it was just like one instant and moment, like there was a breach or a headline or something, but it was really just having consistent conversations with parents and family and friends being able to ask like, you know, questions about cybersecurity when they learned that you're a cybersecurity consultant and whispering and, you know, is this normal? When they had certain questions about their kids in the digital age.

And I think it just became acknowledging the fact that there's a lot of smart, loving parents that didn't necessarily feel clueless, but they really felt unsupported and that's when we both realized the security world wasn't really speaking family and we wanted to be able to change that.

Now, Kay, you often have said that informed users are really the first line of defense. Why does that matter even more for kids and, and teens today?

Yeah, great question.

I think it's just, it's even more important for kids growing up in this digital age because they aren't just using technology, they are literally growing up inside of it. When they understand why something is risky, they make better choices, even when no one's watching.

So if they understand what the risk is and why they need to make certain decisions, they're more aware and awareness scales better than just technical parental controls.

So then ideally, what age should these conversations between parents and child start about digital safety? Chad?

As soon as they want to. As soon as you want to have the conversation.

I'd say I started having conversations with my kids when it was kindergarten time just because I was aware in working with schools at the institution level of when they were handing out Chromebooks. So I knew that my child was going into kindergarten and a device was going to be tossed right in front of them.

They don't have the luxury or the time, I guess that we had growing up where we had typing classes and we saw the evolution of a floppy disk to a tinier disc to a cd. So we grew up with technology.

These kids are really just being thrown right into it and teachers don't have the time to teach them the basics, let alone cyber security. So I wanted to make sure that when my son was given that device, he had some context around it and it wasn't just a good luck.

Lots of materials on this topic, everywhere you turn, the two of you sit down and tackle this project. What was your approach? What did you want to achieve by writing this book?

I think we really wanted to achieve empowering families, empowering parents. Because it is, there's, as you said, there's so much material out there, right?

Like you can listen to so so many different news stories that really kind of have a lot of fear mongering to it in addition to the warning for parents, and then go and read 600 different books that might end up saying 600 different things.

So we really wanted to make it as clear and tactical for parents as well, so that they could walk away feeling a little bit more empowered and educated to help protect their families. And even if it was just for one family, that made a difference, that would make a difference for us.

So let's break down and unpack some of the themes in your book in terms of, you know, when parents think about online danger, we tend to always think about worst case scenarios. But there are some dangers that are far more apparent and obvious.

What are some of those, Chad, that you think that parents really need to be mindful of?

Yeah, so every year I feel like I get a new application with school, a new online form that I have to fill out every little piece of data that we put into those applications. I question if it's protected properly.

So parents need to take a look at the different data points and think about privacy from that lens of personally identifiable information or pii. So name, phone number, address, a couple other things and someone can steal someone's identity.

But parents are asked to give this information and we were told that we need to in certain regards but not always. Right. Like the parents don't. The parents don't know where the data is going and they don't know all the ramifications of that.

So I think to me it's the data that's behind all these different things that's I think most problematic.

So how does that become something a parent can do without it being a huge project that takes time to verify?

So one of the first things that we have in the book, every chapter ends with those tactical things that Kay was mentioning. There's probably four at the end of every chapter where it says this will take 15 minutes.

Locking their credit is something that an adult can do because you're over 18 and you can go online to the credit bureaus, all three of them and in 15 minutes you can lock your credit. A child, you have to do it for them. And it's a paper process.

So we actually wrote a companion blog after I went through all the steps with my two boys of locking their credit of fill out this form. All three of them want different information.

TransUnion wants a personalized letter but I tried to break it down easily so folks could lock credit because you will have to give up some of this information for some of these applications online. But locking their credit is going to put a huge firewall between the bad guys and your child's identity.

If they do get that data, they're not going to be able to open a credit card with it, for example.

Are there any other non negotiables? Let's call them in terms of what you think parents really need to understand up front.

Call it a firewall or some kind of protection that they should consider from the get go.

Okay. I was going to get into social media here. But if you have something, feel free to add on. I think this.

Yeah, go ahead. No, you go first. I'll add on. Thank you.

The sharing of digital information beyond the data points of the personal identifiable information pictures, in the world of AI that we live in these days, it goes a long way. There's a lot of manipulation that can happen with pictures. There's a lot of data that can be collected from that.

The bad guys are using those as data points to breach someone's privacy, let alone the ramifications of all those pictures online. Does your child want them online? They don't know yet. Will they have an opinion about that when they're 18? Probably.

But this is something that I think parents need to start thinking of whether or not they really need to share something on social media. They really need to post that picture because it is. It's dangerous at times.

I think one non negotiable is so when we were doing research, when writing the book, we learned that throughout a childhood like development, parents on average only speak to their kids about digital safety for 45 minutes. I mean that's from like 0 to 18, essentially 45 minutes to talk about digital safety.

And so I think one non negotiable that parents should consider really is that your kid does not start touching technology or have their own individual devices without a conversation with them first. To Chad's point, it's not a, Here's a phone. You have to contact us when you're done with like sports after school. That's what you're using it.

Here you go. That's like a 30 second conversation right there. We're talking more about, hey, here's a phone. I know that you're probably going to get apps.

These are the apps that I think are good. These are the apps that I think are not good or you know, bad.

And why explain to why you're giving them the devices and what are some of their risks that they should be aware with? I think that's a non negotiable. It's a conversation with your kids before they have full access to whatever technology you're giving them.

What are some of the common mistakes, let's call it, that parents may make, you know, personal identifiable information, photos, those kinds of things. Is there anything else that you think that parents commonly do that maybe they should reconsider?

I do think like the idea of if it's private, it's fine. And what we mean by that is again like posting on socials or posting on any type of platforms where it's a private group, it's fine.

And so it's still a don't share anything you wouldn't want to be shown in a headline in the news, so to speak. And the reason being is someone can take a screenshot of whatever you share.

Someone can still download whatever you share at times and you don't have control over who they share that with. So you might have a close group of friends and that's amazing that you want to share baby pictures with.

However, just understand that those baby pictures still can get out there somewhere, even if it's in a private setting, private group, and not necessarily over sharing that even within the private setting, so to speak. Because if it's online, it's online forever, period.

So how does one roll that back? Is that possible for parents who listen to this saying, I regularly share photos. We've all done it to some extent. Is it possible to roll it back?

Chad, you can't really undo what's on the Internet, right. You can shut down your Facebook account and you can ask for your photos from Facebook.

I can't tell you that they're going to actually give them to you. But I think the best thing to do is just to stop and you have to have conversations with folks about doing that.

Right.

And educate them on why you're stopping because they're not going to understand. Everyone thinks that it's just, well, it's just a baby picture and I want to see it.

You don't know what kind of icloud or other cloud controls they have on their devices and where those photos might be going. So the best thing you can do is just stop right now.

It's interesting because as we mentioned, you're both cybersecurity professionals. So you see this at a very high level in terms of the, you know, the organizations that you work with.

Can you take us through, Chad, what that looks like at that level and how you've sort of distilled it down for parents and families in this book?

Yeah.

So the day to day we use a lot of cyber terms and everyone understands those cyber terms because that's the world that we work in and live in from our 9 to 5. At the institution level, there's a lot of controls and every school is different.

I've seen schools that have what's called a walled garden where students can't get outside of that school for Internet purposes and others that barely have a firewall. So it's, it's all over the place.

With schools, the conversation that we have with parents while there is tech involved, because people have questions about the tech. We like to simplify even more, like explaining what cybersecurity really means, explaining what privacy really means.

So the, the conversation is way more technical at the institution level because they have those controls and frameworks that they're working with. But the, the parents don't need the noise, we'll call it, if you believe in the whole noise, to signal conversation.

Parents need to know the tactical, practical things. So we're going to stay away from the bits and bites, if you will, and have more of the conversation based things to do.

Then controls are put in place.

I'd like to just add on to that, if that's all right. So we also work with large scale enterprises where they really approach cybersecurity from a multi layer defense perspective.

We wanted to contextualize that for families as well.

When we're talking to families or writing this book, we thought about what are the multiple layers of defense that we can really contextualize for a family, for a parent.

That's why we talk about, yes, technical controls, for instance, how to control configure certain routers within your home, what kind of devices, technical settings you can have on them, but also from a communication standpoint too. What are the conversations and topics you can start having with your kids? What are some contracts you can have in place for digital safety?

And so we really wanted to take that multi layered approach when it comes to cyber defense with large scale enterprises and make it more tactical for a family to be able to implement for themselves.

Are there any examples that you can provide?

Yeah, tons of them. So one such example is actually the contract we talked about.

So we have a contract in our book that we literally created it with the intent of parents ripping it out of the book. There's not too many books out there that are like, yeah, we want you to tear these pages out. We do.

And part of it is because we, in our day to day lives, we have a lot of contracts in place with clients and a lot of times that allows us to have very clear setting goals and conversations with our clients. Why not contextualize that for families and parents with kids?

So we created a contract where the intent is for the parent to be able to sit down with their kid and have a conversation, to set expectations of what does digital safety mean for the whole family, not just the kids, the parents too. And what are the standards they're gonna set themselves that they adhere to within the context of their day to day.

In addition to the four points that after each chapter Chad was talking about, we have activities that parents can complete, but conversations or topics that they can also have as well. So it's not just a, hey, go open your phone and see what settings are there. It's also, hey, open your phone. See the settings.

Walk your kid through it, too. Ask them, do you know what this means? Do you know what that means? Do you know why I'm doing this?

So that's kind of some of the examples we have in our book.

So building on that point, then, is there a stage that you think parents sort of ease up too soon, especially as children get older into their teens?

There's peer pressure involved there. I always get asked, what age should my child get a phone? And I'm not going to give a number because it's a. It's a maturity thing.

And I think need versus want. When children go into school and they have to have a phone for certain activities, then that might be the time.

But certainly there's not like a written in stone. When it's necessary to have a device. It's really up to the parents to understand what devices they're giving their kids.

And at that point, you've had enough conversations where there's an understanding of what they should and shouldn't be doing with the device.

So if a teen already has built up an online history, how can a parent then have a conversation with that young person that really focuses on building responsibility as opposed to shame?

Yeah.

So when we get to, there's a couple different posters, little graphics in the book that we've created into posters for some schools that are broken down by agents. When we get to the high school piece, because there's elementary, middle, high, we start talking about your life after school and applying for a job.

There's nothing to do with shame there. It's. It's all about your online presence.

Someone's going to do a background check on you multiple times in your career, depending on the career that you have.

But in order to get into a school, in order to get a job, when I Google your name and everyone should try Googling their name, what comes up that conversation, and showing them the certain things that come up starts to paint a picture of. Is that the person that you want to be seen as to a stranger, to someone, to a CEO of a corporation one day.

But that's where I'm planning to take the conversation, the same conversation I had when I was younger to make sure that that online presence was in place.

And I think focusing Also less on like fear mongering or, you know, shame. It's something that you can even irregardless of the age, you can say, hey, look, digital footprints are similar to physical fingerprints, right?

You leave fingerprints behind no matter what. Unless you're going to wear gloves all day long, which nobody really does.

So being able to say, hey, look, you're going to have fingerprints wherever you go, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing.

But also understand like what you're touching online and the presence you're leaving online, that's where you need to be a little bit more aware of what are you touching and what are you leaving behind, because it can still show up down the road. So just making them aware of your digital footprint is like fingerprints, right?

Like you're leaving little tracks behind and people can see them or pick them up. It doesn't always mean it's a bad thing, but it's something to be aware of what you're touching.

So beyond the extreme dangers then, and we've talked about a few of them, what everyday online experiences do you think parents need to know about that quietly can affect the emotional health of their children?

Because of course, we're seeing more and more of that being reported and obviously some of the more, you know, terrifying headlines that families experience. But what are some of the quiet sort of online experiences that parents need.

To be aware of?

Chats. So every game has a chat in it. Basically at this point you can lock them down to a certain extent.

But I don't think that parents are aware of all the different applications that do have chat functions, let alone the group chats that children have. There's a lot of cyberbullying that happens in those, whether or not the kids realize it or not.

But when there's a big group setting like that, there's peer pressure again involved. And certain things can be said that are offensive and someone might not know they're being offensive.

But quietly, your child might be on a Nintendo Switch chatting to a stranger and you have no idea because you don't know that that application, that game that they're playing even has the chat functionality. So that to me is something that I feel every parent should look into. A device that they're giving their child.

Google some of the settings, look into games and Google some of the settings. There's a bunch that have made headlines. Roblox, Discord, the combination of the two.

That's where chat's really gone wrong across the different devices.

And I don't think parents have A beat on that because they're not always having the conversation with their children about how they're using the applications.

So go ahead.

I was going to say also from a plus one, from a chat perspective, it's also the voice chats. So sometimes it's not necessarily just the messages that are being written and left behind.

It's also just the live conversations that are happening on these gaming systems that parents might not necessarily be aware aware of because you think they're most likely talking to their friends.

But it is possible that unfortunately, like they might be getting groomed by a stranger or they might be hearing certain conversations or noises in the background that maybe they shouldn't be necessarily ready to hear. And so it's the voice chats as well.

When it comes to gaming and being able to connect and talk live with someone, the fact is a lot of those systems, they're not being monitored and there's not necessarily as much regulation when it comes to live voice chats when it comes to gaming.

So how does a parent go about managing that? Let's say this is not something you've researched prior to your child using this platform or this app and now you listen to this interview.

It's on your radar. What should you be doing next?

Talking to your kid. So you should be talking to them and saying, hey, look, you know, what are you playing nowadays?

Like what's a, what's a cool game that you guys are online for? And hopefully you had been aware of the applications that are on their devices.

Like I said, it's the conversation before you give your kids those technologies. Being able to have like a real, like, what are the platforms you should be using? What are the platforms you shouldn't be.

But obviously technology changes every day, so one of the no go platforms might have appeared that you didn't even know of. And so being able to have a conversation with your kid and say, hey, what games are you playing? And being able to say, oh, like what do you do?

Like, are, are you talking to friends? Is it like global? Are you able to just talk to anyone and really being able to say, how are you feeling when you play those games?

Like, is it ever kind of weird? Does anyone ever have like weird conversations with you? Do you feel uncomfortable or do you mind showing me?

Am I allowed to play one game with you one night?

And really it is a, it's not a, let me have this conversation so I can enforce net new rules on you and make you feel shameful of what you've been doing.

But it's more of let me have a conversation with you to start building trust so that you know that you can come to me if you are encountering these situations that you don't know how to react to. So that would be my advice. I'm not sure, Chad, if you have any, any others, I mean, I'd just.

Say that we're, we've been talking about the four walls of our homes to this point, what's happening at school. This goes right back to the doubling down on what Kay said about conversations.

And I'll say that that is a foundation of what we've been preaching with the book and all these conversations is you have to have communication. We don't want to see that 45, 46 minute stat of that's the only amount of time you talk to your children.

But ask them what, what kind of games they play at school, what kind of applications they use at school, how they're learning. It's very interesting. It's also really interesting to talk to kids about what cybersecurity is and how they define it because they have an answer.

And that to me is awesome. When I go and talk to a fourth grader and I talk to an eighth grader, they know different things, but they know things.

So I'm impressed when I talk to these kids a lot of the time. And that's where you get into the curiosity of what they're doing at school because you know, what they're doing at home.

It's such a massive topic, as you both know. And every day there are multiple headlines of like large organizations, you know, cybersecurity threats involving them.

And you would think that they have all of these firewalls and all of that. And then, you know, when you come down to a household and parents trying to manage this along with everybody else, it is, you know, overwhelming.

So what is a, you know, reasonable starting point in any family to start these conversations? And you know what, what can a small step towards improving digital safety in a household include?

I'd say start the conversation with the basics.

Okay, I know that you're going to have something to add on to this, but I'm going to give you my how I started with my 8 year old a couple of years ago. What's a password? What's your password? See if they'll tell you what it is.

And it's great if they do because you're the parent, but maybe talk to them about not sharing their password with someone else.

So the basics of passwords, device management are the first Things that I started with because I want to make sure that my son knows how to use his devices at home, but also how him and his friends and students at school should be using each other's devices or not in this instance. Kay, did you have something to add to that?

Yeah, I was just going to say kind of circling back to the original. Talking to your kid and asking them, what does digital safety mean to you?

That's one thing that parents can do today to make them feel a little bit better in the sense of, okay, let's pulse check. What does my second grader know about digital safety versus maybe what does my high schooler know about digital safety?

And that gives you a baseline to start with to know, hey, what is my kid aware of when it comes to their digital footprint? Do they know what a digital footprint is? Do they think of digital safety as just passwords?

Or do they think about digital safety from a privacy standpoint? And that's a really great way to start because then you can build what is the next steps I should have what are the conversations?

Because if you notice that your kid only talks about passwords for digital safety, then it's like, oh, but do you know what privacy is? Let me talk to you about privacy. Let's go through privacy.

What's something that maybe you don't want to have online or shared in a group chat or insert any other topic you want to have here?

I think that's something parents can walk away with to say, hey, I started the conversation with my kid today just talking about what is digital safety for you?

What about for parents who maybe are on a need to know basis with all these different types of new technologies that are coming out every second of the day and they have, let's call it a cursory understanding of these different technologies.

What would you say to them about why this is increasingly important for them to understand cybersecurity and you know, communicate that to their kids?

I'll take this one maybe first and then we're just both so excited to talk about it.

We usually talk over each other, but I think what it is is you should have the conversations and be aware because technology is changing so quickly that it almost feels like sci Fi.

And an example I will give is with AI nowadays, the technology that is literally in your kids hands, it's not the same technology that you were raised with or thought possible outside of sci fi books. And this technology has real world and emotional and physical impacts on your kids safety and well being. You have to care about it.

I don't know about you, Chad.

So unless you live in the woods without Internet and you're probably not listening to this episode right now anyways. But it's pretty hard to stay away from technology.

And it's really important that if you don't understand it, to read something like our book that breaks it down and makes it more digestible.

It's 84 pages. It's called Cyber Smart Parenting. For each of you, what is one thing you want readers of your book to leave with?

Chad, you want to take it first.

We talked about the contract. That contract is super important and starts the conversation to us both.

And I'm going to steal case thunder here because I'm sure she wants to talk about this too. It's the conversation we want folks to take away from this that you have to start with a conversation.

You have to start with some of the tactical steps within the book. And really, it's not something that you need to tackle right now. It's meant to evolve with you.

I'm going through the book myself, selfishly, kind of wrote it for myself to make sure that I could go through the book chapter by chapter as my children get older and check some things off.

Yeah, I would just say that he did steal my thunder a little bit about the. But really the takeaway we want you to have with Cyber Smart Parenting is you actually don't need to be technical. You just need to be present.

You just need to have those conversations. The safest kids aren't the most restricted.

They're the ones who know that they can come to their parents before something like a crisis were to happen. So that's the key takeaway. I think I would love for parents to have from our book lots of.

Important food for thought on a topic. As we mentioned, ever evolving. And it's never been more important than to be on top of it today.

Chad Richliewski and Kay David, co authors of Cyberspant Parenting, thank you so much for your time and your inspiration insight today.

Thank you for having us.

Yes, thank you.

To learn more about today's podcast, guest and topic, as well as other parenting themes, visit whereparents talk.com.