Somewhere in your house there is a tablet with a smudged screen and a kid who knows how to use it better than you do. That is normal. What is also normal, and less obvious, is that the same tablet is where your child will meet their first scam. Not a virus. A pop-up offering free coins, a message from a stranger who seems friendly, a “verification code” someone urgently needs.
Here is the thing about that first encounter: somebody is going to teach your kid how the internet works. It will either be you, on purpose, in the kitchen, or it will be the internet itself, by surprise, at a bad moment. This is a guide for doing it the first way. It is not about fear, and it is not about taking the tablet away. It is about building judgment, in small pieces, over years, so that when something feels off your kid already knows what off feels like.
Start earlier than feels necessary
Parents usually wait for a milestone. First phone, first social account. By then the habits are set. The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance for parents puts it plainly: “Talking with your kids about your family’s rules and expectations is key to helping them establish good online habits.” Habits, not rules for emergencies. That word choice matters.
You are not trying to explain fraud to a six year old. You are trying to make “let me show you something weird I saw online” an ordinary sentence in your house. Everything else builds on that.
What to say at each age
The message stays the same and the vocabulary changes. Roughly speaking, here is how it tends to go.
- Ages four to six. Keep it concrete and physical. Some things on the screen are toys and some things are ads that want your money. If something on the screen asks you a question, come get me. That is the whole curriculum. No explaining, no scaring.
- Ages seven to nine. Introduce the idea that people online can pretend. Not everyone who says they are a kid is a kid, and not everyone who says they are your friend has met you. Start naming the trick: free things that ask for your password are not free.
- Ages ten to twelve. The peak of in-game offers and the beginning of group chats. Talk about urgency as a warning sign in itself. Anything that says you have to decide right now is trying to skip the part where you think.
- Ages thirteen and up. Now you can talk about the mechanics: account takeovers, codes, phishing links, sextortion, and the fact that scammers target teenagers because teens are embarrassed to ask for help. Be blunt. They respect blunt at this age.
Four rules that actually stick
Long lists do not survive contact with a nine year old. Short lines do. These four hold up well, and we use versions of them with adults too.
- Nobody real ever asks for a code. If a text or an app sends a six digit code, that code is for your kid’s eyes only. Not a friend, not a moderator, not “support,” not a person in a game who says they need it to send a gift. This rule alone stops a huge share of account theft, because most account theft is just somebody talking a person out of a code. If you want the grown-up version of this conversation, our comparison of a security key versus a passkey versus regular MFA covers why codes are the weak link.
- Free things that need your password are not free. Free skins, free coins, free followers, free game passes. The price is the account. Say it in exactly those words and it becomes a joke in your family, which is the best possible outcome, because jokes get remembered.
- Tell me and you will not be in trouble. Say this out loud, more than once, and then honor it the first time it gets tested. Every scam that ruins a kid’s month is a scam that could have been stopped in the first ten minutes if they had not been afraid of your reaction.
- Warnings on a screen never give you a phone number. The FTC’s tech support scam guidance says it directly: “Real security pop-up warnings and messages will never ask you to call a phone number.” A kid who knows that one line will never fall for the fake virus screen.
Games, gift cards, and the thing that costs money
Most of the money that leaves a household because of a kid’s device does not leave through a dramatic hack. It leaves through a tap. In an April 2025 consumer alert about kids, video games, and unexpected payments, the FTC noted that ads compete for a child’s attention at every stage of playing, and that games do not always make clear that “Each click is a payment.”
The FTC’s practical recommendation in that same alert is to “Use parental controls to disable in-app purchases or require a password for all purchases on your phone or tablet.” Both the major mobile platforms and the major game consoles have a purchase approval setting in their family or parental control area. Turn it on once and it does its job forever.
- Require approval for every purchase. Not a spending limit. Approval. Limits teach kids to spend up to the limit.
- Do not leave a card saved on the kid’s profile. If buying something requires a grown-up to walk over, impulse purchases mostly stop happening.
- Teach the gift card rule early. The FTC’s gift card guidance states that “No real business or government agency will ever tell you to buy a gift card to pay them.” Kids get pulled into this from the other direction, when someone in a game promises free currency in exchange for the numbers on the back of a card. Same rule, opposite angle: the numbers on the back are the money.
- Check the receipts. App stores email a receipt for everything. A five minute scan once a month catches a pattern early.
Make it a habit, not a lecture
The single biggest mistake is treating this as one big talk. One talk gets tuned out, and it also puts all the weight on a moment when your kid is probably already anxious. What works better is a hundred tiny mentions spread across years, most of them lasting under a minute.
- Narrate your own near misses. When you get a fake delivery text, show them. Say out loud what tipped you off. Kids learn scam detection the way they learn cooking: by watching somebody do it.
- Ask instead of telling. “What do you think this message wants?” beats a lecture every time, and it tells you what they already understand.
- Let them teach you something. Ask how a game they play makes money. They usually know, and explaining it out loud cements it.
- Revisit when the device changes. New phone, new console, new game with chat: each one is a natural five minute check in without it feeling like a punishment.
The bottom line
You are not trying to raise a kid who never gets fooled. Adults get fooled and the tricks keep improving. You are trying to raise a kid whose first instinct when something feels strange is to come tell you, and who has four short rules in their head that cover most of what will be aimed at them. Turn on purchase approval, say the four rules until they are boring, and keep the door open. That is genuinely most of it.
We spend our days helping businesses in Denton County untangle this kind of thing, and much of what we know came from watching the same tricks work on people of every age. If a question comes up at your house and you want a straight answer from someone who is not selling you an app, we are glad to help. Contact us today.
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