DiGii Social is a world-first way to teach children the skills to be safe, civil and savvy online in their formative years – you know, the ones where they still listen to us more than they don’t.

If you’re raising a child, it’s a given that at some point you’ve had the nagging about getting onto socials. There are some good arguments raised – all their friends are allowed, they’re super-trustworthy, they’ll miss out on all the good stuff if they’re not on!

We’ve built DiGii Social to be a live and immersive training ground for children BEFORE giving them access to the online space. It’s your child’s digital life passport, getting all the stamps of approval before being allowed access to the internet and all of its content and contacts.

DiGii Social allows children in parent-established safe social networks to chat and play in a social media-like environment that does all the monitoring and teaching in real time.

We use a clever and ethical application of AI to monitor every keystroke and with catch bad language, meanness, exclusions and cyberbullying right at the start. Our character DiGii pops up and gives 3 warnings before a child is required to watch a brief educational video that teaches them a digital life skill.

Swimming lessons for digital life

I don’t know a parent who knowingly places their child in harm’s way. In every aspect of parenting, where there’s a known danger involved, we teach our children the skills towards mastery to ensure their safety.

Let’s use swimming as an example. We not only take our children to swimming lessons to build their water safety skills, we also make sure that we fence bodies of water that pose a risk to our child’s safety – like our backyard swimming pools. When we extend that to digital life which poses an enormous risk to the safety and wellbeing of our children, building skills towards mastery matters. It’s not enough to build a fence – or use parent controls – if we haven’t taught the curious child who climbs the fence how to swim – or stay safe in their digital life too.

For many parents, delaying the entry to digital life is most certainly a wonderful protective measure. But one day digital life is going to happen – the school are going to introduce devices as part of learning or your child’s best friend is going to have open access to every app and then share all of that learning and exposure with your child.

Just like swimming lessons and careful instruction on how to cross a road safely, we, as parents need to get out ahead of digital life and teach our children the skills to be safe, civil and savvy online.