Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant shares her best tips for protecting kids from online harm.
Julie Inman Grant leads the world’s first regulatory agency designed to keep people safe online, after an influential career working with US Congress, as well as in senior positions at Silicon Valley giants Microsoft and Twitter.
But she’s also just a mum, albeit one who understands better than most the pressures parents face in keeping their kids out of harm’s way online.“My daughter is 16 years old,” says Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, “and I knew that the world was going to be very different when she was about three, and was more interested in playing with my phone than she was playing with a doll.”
Fast-forward to her current experience with 10-year-old twins, and the challenge feels even bigger. “They say, ‘Mum, every kid except for us has a phone.’ And … they’re just not ready yet,” she says. “They just don’t have the cognitive ability to self-regulate, to deal with the content, conduct, and a whole range of other things that we need to prepare them for.”
The need for parental oversight has never been greater. Forty-two per cent of two-year-olds have access to a digital device, she notes, and by the time they turn four, it’s up to 94 per cent. If that’s not alarming enough, on the latest episode of, Inman Grant details the kind of content that comes through her office; live-streamed terror attacks, the flaying of Mexican drug-cartel victims, cyber fraud, cyberbullying, online image abuse and grooming.
Compounding this threat, the pandemic has left families more precariously placed to deal with digital harm. “Parents were desperate during the lockdowns to do their own jobs, to home-school their kids, to keep them entertained,” she says. “And my sense is that parents – as a survival mechanism – had to be more permissive with technology. But there are basic steps you take to protect your family.