By the time most children start school, they’re already seasoned internet users. They’ve watched hundreds of videos on a parent’s phone, asked a smart speaker for their favourite song and video-called relatives on three continents. They can’t read a word of any of it. That combination, deep familiarity with zero capability, is what makes online safety in early years its own discipline.
Safety the child can’t do for themselves
Older children can be taught to spot risks, question strangers and guard their information. Under-fives can’t. They can’t manage online risk in any meaningful way, which means their safety online depends entirely on the adults around them: parents, grandparents, practitioners, childminders. The job in early years isn’t teaching a three-year-old about privacy settings. It’s making sure every adult in that child’s orbit knows what they’re doing.
That reframing matters, because it moves online safety from an occasional circle-time topic to a standing part of safeguarding practice, on a par with the way your setting handles doors, gates and collection passwords.
The four Cs, sized for under-fives
The established framework here is the four Cs: content, contact, conduct and commerce. Applied to under-fives, each takes a particular shape. Content is the autoplay rabbit hole, where a stream of nursery rhymes drifts, video by video, into something stranger, with no reader at the controls to notice. Contact and conduct are mostly about the adults: what gets shared, shown and modelled around the child. Commerce is the in-app purchase made by a determined toddler thumb, and the apps built to encourage exactly that.
Alongside the risks sit the habits worth building, and they’re refreshingly ordinary. Co-viewing rather than handing the device over. Choosing quality content instead of whatever the algorithm serves next. Balance across the day, and screen-free bedtimes. None of it requires a single technical skill, which is rather the point.
Settings have their own duties on top: how devices are used and stored, how photographs are taken and shared, consent, filtered internet connections and a policy that actually reflects daily practice. A tablet used for observations, a smart TV in the preschool room and the wifi the whole building runs on all sit inside this, and a policy written before those things arrived is due an update.
Partners at the door, not judges
Most parents of young children are working this out for the first time, often with a background hum of screen guilt. They’re wondering whether the smart speaker is listening, whether posting first-day photos is wise, whether the tablet at dinner is a failure. A practitioner who can talk about sharenting, family agreements and connected homes without a raised eyebrow becomes a trusted source of support, and that helps the child far more than any leaflet.
The horizon keeps moving too. AI chatbots, generated content and deepfakes have arrived in family life, and practitioners need at least an awareness-level understanding, plus the keeping-watch habit that stops today’s knowledge quietly expiring.
And children watch us. A practitioner glued to a tablet models one relationship with screens; one who uses it briefly, narrates what she’s doing and puts it down models another. In a phase of life built on imitation, the adults’ own habits around devices are part of the curriculum whether we plan them or not.
Our course Online Safety in Early Years: Protecting Our Youngest Digital Natives covers all of this across six focused lessons and a short assessment, online, at your own pace, on any device. It works as individual CPD or as shared training for a whole team, and pairs naturally with your setting’s safeguarding training.
Become the adults who keep the youngest children safe online.
Six lessons on the four Cs, healthy digital habits, your setting’s duties and partnering with parents, from an NFAQ-accredited training provider.
The internet reached the pram years ago. The children can’t be their own first line of defence, so the adults have to be, and adults can be trained.