When the Playground Follows Them Home
Cyberbullying, online dangers and helping our children
feel safe enough to tell us
There was a time when a difficult day in the playground could, at least in theory, finish at the school gate. A child might come home bruised by a cruel comment, a friendship rupture or the humiliation of being left out, but home offered some physical distance from it. The bedroom door could close. Dinner happened. Tomorrow was another day.
The online world has changed that geography.
Now the playground can follow a child into the lounge room, onto the bus, beneath the doona and into the small hours of the night. A hurtful comment can be repeated, screenshotted, forwarded and laughed at by people who were not even present when it began. An embarrassing photograph can suddenly have an audience. A friendship disagreement can become a group-chat spectacle before a parent has even realised anything is wrong.
And yet the online world is not simply a dangerous place from which we need to rescue our children. It is also where they learn, laugh, play games, create things, maintain friendships, discover music, explore interests and increasingly make sense of the world around them.
That is what makes parenting around technology difficult. We are not trying to keep children out of a bad world. We are helping them learn how to move safely through a world containing both enormous possibility and genuine risk.
Cyberbullying is still bullying but the walls have disappeared
At its simplest, cyberbullying is the use of online communication to deliberately hurt, humiliate, threaten, exclude or distress another person. It might involve cruel messages, rumours, deliberate exclusion from group chats, fake accounts, embarrassing photographs, videos, memes or content shared without permission.
The behaviour may be digital, but the emotional consequences are very real.
Recent Australian research from the eSafety Commissioner gives us reason to take this seriously. In a nationally representative survey of 3,454 Australian children aged 10 to 17 conducted in late 2024 and early 2025, 53 per cent reported having experienced cyberbullying at some point, while 38 per cent had experienced it during the previous twelve months. Importantly, the person responsible was not usually some anonymous villain hiding on the other side of the world. In the most recent cyberbullying experience reported by children, 75 per cent said the person involved was someone they knew in real life.
That matters because our old language of “online danger” sometimes places too much emphasis on strangers.
For many children, the online world is simply an extension of the relationships they already have. The child excluding them from the group chat may sit beside them in maths. The person sharing the photograph may once have been their best friend. The nasty comment posted at 8:30 at night may come from somebody they must face again at 8:30 the next morning.
Cyberbullying can therefore become difficult to escape. Unlike a cruel remark that disappears into the air, online material can be copied, reshared and revisited. Australian health and safety authorities have long noted that this persistence and reach are part of what can make online bullying particularly distressing.
For a young person whose friendships and emerging identity matter enormously, being publicly humiliated or rejected online can feel less like “something that happened on the phone” and much more like their entire social world has turned against them.
Why children sometimes do not tell us
Parents often say, “I just wish they had told me.”
The uncomfortable truth is that children sometimes have very sensible reasons for remaining silent.
They may feel embarrassed. They may worry they somehow caused the problem. They may believe speaking up will make the bullying worse. They may fear their parents will contact the school, ring another parent, storm onto a platform or turn a private social disaster into something even larger and, perhaps most importantly, they may fear losing the device.
Imagine being fourteen and already feeling excluded from your friendship group, then believing that telling Mum or Dad will result in your phone being confiscated and your remaining connection to that group disappearing as well. From an adult perspective, taking the phone away might feel protective. From the young person’s perspective, it can feel like being punished for telling the truth.
The eSafety Commissioner specifically advises parents to resist reacting automatically by banning devices when a child reports cyberbullying, because this can increase feelings of isolation and make young people less willing to seek help. Instead, children benefit enormously from having at least one trusted adult who can listen without judgement and help them work through what happens next.
That may be one of the most important pieces of online safety advice we can give parents: build the relationship before you need the disclosure.
Our children need to know that they can bring us the messy story. Not simply the sanitised version in which they made every sensible decision and behaved perfectly. They need to be able to say, “I accepted the request,” “I sent the picture,” “I said something awful back,” or “I knew I shouldn’t have done it” without first having to calculate whether parental disappointment will be worse than the problem itself.
Safety grows from boundaries, certainly, but it also grows from psychological safety.
The danger is broader than bullying
Cyberbullying deserves attention, but it is not the only challenge children encounter online.
Personal information can reveal far more than children realise. A school uniform in a photograph, a sporting club mentioned in a profile, a location tag, a birthday, a phone number or a photograph taken outside the family home can gradually build a surprisingly detailed picture of a child’s life.
eSafety warns that personal information shared online can be misused for scams, fraud, identity theft, unwanted contact and sexual grooming. Images can also travel well beyond the audience for which they were intended, including being copied, reposted or manipulated into fake or deepfake material.
This does not mean we need to frighten children into believing every person online is dangerous. Fear is rarely a particularly sophisticated safety strategy. What children need is judgement.
They need to learn that somebody being friendly does not automatically make them a friend. They need to understand that a person asking them to keep conversations secret, move onto another platform, send private images or hide a relationship from adults is giving them information about their intentions.
Online grooming can involve adults gradually building trust before introducing sexualised conversation, requesting images, blackmailing a child or attempting to arrange contact. Australian authorities also warn that online sexual exploitation can include coercion, sexual extortion and manipulation through intimate images.
For teenagers in particular, conversations about intimate images need to be more thoughtful than simply saying, “Never send one.”
Young people make mistakes. They fall in love. They experience pressure. They flirt. They trust the wrong person. They sometimes do impulsive things with a developing brain and a device capable of transmitting those decisions globally in seconds.
The most important message is therefore not only about prevention. It is also about what happens next.
If somebody threatens to share an intimate image, demands money, requests more photographs or uses embarrassment to control a young person, that is abuse. eSafety advises that sexual extortion should not be met by paying the blackmailer or sending further material, and that young people need to know they can seek help without being blamed for whatever happened beforehand.
A child who has made an unsafe decision still deserves safety.
Teach privacy without teaching paranoia
Good digital safety begins with simple habits established long before children become independent online.
We can teach children that private information belongs to them. Their full name, address, school details, location, passwords and phone number should not casually be handed out simply because an app, game or person asks for them. Privacy settings should be checked, accounts should not automatically be open to everybody, and friend or follow requests deserve a moment of thought rather than an automatic tap.
But there is another side to digital privacy that adults sometimes forget: our children are watching what we do with their privacy too.
If we want them to understand that photographs and personal information deserve thought before sharing, it helps when we demonstrate the same respect. Asking an older child before posting an embarrassing family photograph may seem like a small thing, but it teaches something important about consent, dignity and control over one's own image.
We also need to move beyond the old warning that “the internet is forever.” It is memorable, but it can become so enormous that children stop listening.
A more useful conversation might be: “Would you be comfortable if this travelled further than you intended?” That encourages a pause. It turns digital safety from an adult lecture into a small act of judgement, and judgement is ultimately what we are trying to develop.
If something goes wrong, calm is a safety tool
The moment a child tells us something frightening has happened online is not the moment to deliver our finest lecture. It is the moment to become very steady.
Listen first. Work out whether they are safe. Ask what has happened, who is involved, how long it has been happening and what they are frightened might happen next. Try not to seize the device and begin firing messages at everybody involved while your child watches the situation leave their control completely.
Where cyberbullying is occurring, eSafety recommends keeping evidence such as screenshots, usernames and links, reporting harmful material through the platform, tightening privacy settings and then using blocking, muting or other tools to prevent further contact. Serious cyberbullying affecting an Australian child under 18 can also be reported to eSafety if the platform does not adequately address it.
If there is suspected grooming, sexual exploitation, coercion or blackmail involving a child, the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation provides a national reporting pathway. If a child is in immediate danger, the appropriate response is calling emergency services.
There is an important difference between remaining calm and treating something casually. Calm tells a frightened child, “This is serious, but you are not alone and we can work out what to do.” That is a powerful message.
Sometimes our child may be the one doing the harm
This is perhaps the conversation parents least want to imagine, but it matters just as much.
Our children will not always be the victim in every story. Sometimes they may join the pile-on, forward the photograph, make the joke, exclude somebody from the chat or post something deliberately cruel.
Discovering that does not mean we have raised a terrible human being. It means we have discovered behaviour requiring attention.
Children need accountability, but accountability works best when it is connected to empathy. We can help them understand that a screen does not reduce the humanity of the person on the other side of it. We can talk about what happened, who was hurt, why the behaviour occurred, what needs to be repaired and what they will do differently next time.
Part of digital citizenship is learning that our values should travel with us when we pick up a device. Kindness online is not a lesser version of kindness. Neither is cruelty.
Perhaps the best safety setting is still conversation
Technology will keep changing. Apps will disappear and new ones will arrive before most parents have worked out what the previous one actually did. Artificial intelligence will create new possibilities and new risks. Children will invariably know how to use some technologies more quickly than the adults raising them.
Fortunately, keeping children safe has never depended entirely on parents being the smartest person in the room. We still bring something enormously valuable: perspective, judgement, emotional steadiness and relationship.
So, ask about their online lives with the same curiosity you bring to their offline ones. Ask who they play with, what makes them laugh, what annoys them, whether anybody has ever made them uncomfortable, and what people at school are doing online at the moment. Let these be ordinary conversations rather than interrogations triggered only when something goes wrong.
And make sure your child knows who else they can talk to if, for whatever reason, they cannot talk to you. That person might be another parent, a grandparent, auntie, uncle, teacher, school counsellor or another adult both you and your child trust.
Many teen and child specific helplines provide free confidential support for young people specifically around cyberbullying and online experiences.
We cannot remove every risk from our children’s digital lives, just as we cannot remove every risk from the playground, the sporting field, the school bus or eventually the wider adult world.
But we can give them something better than fear. We can give them good judgement, clear boundaries, a strong sense of their own dignity and the confidence to recognise when somebody else is crossing a line. Most importantly, we can give them the knowledge that if the cyberworld ever becomes frightening, humiliating or simply too much, there is a safe place to come home to and a grown-up ready to listen before reaching for the off switch.
References and further reading
The Australian Government eSafety Commissioner provides current guidance for parents and carers on cyberbullying, including signs to watch for, preserving evidence, reporting content and supporting children without automatically removing their devices. eSafety: Cyberbullying — advice for parents and carers
eSafety's recent Keeping Kids Safe Online research provides the Australian prevalence figures used in this article, including findings from 3,454 children aged 10 to 17 surveyed in late 2024 and early 2025. eSafety: How common is cyberbullying among children in Australia?
For information about children's personal information, photographs, privacy settings and digital identity, eSafety provides practical guidance for families. eSafety: Privacy and your child
Parents concerned about grooming, unwanted contact, intimate images or sexual extortion can find specialist guidance through eSafety and the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation. eSafety: Grooming and unwanted contactAustralian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation
Young people who need confidential support can contact Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800 or use its online counselling services. Kids Helpline: Cyberbullying support
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