Giving your child unsupervised access to online gaming and social media is like “letting your kids run around the Luas tracks”, a child online safety expert has said.

With the age of children owning mobile phones, tablets or playing online games getting lower and lower each year, more “hand-holding” needs to happen.

Hotline.ie CEO and former Garda Mick Moran told Lunchtime Live that if you are giving your child a phone straight out of the box, you are a “reckless parent”.

“Most parents don't even realise that there are parental controls on mobile phones,” he said.

“They don't even realise it because they don't bother.

“They are reckless, and it is reckless activity, it's reckless parenting if you are giving your nine-year-old child a phone out of the box - it's madness.

“If you're not paying attention to it, then, in my humble opinion, as a parent myself, but also as a professional who has to deal with this downstream and deal with the results of your recklessness – you are being reckless as a parent.”

"Have that conversation"

Mr Moran said that keeping your child safe on the internet is the same as keeping your child safe on the roads.

“The other important point to remember is that none of [the parental controls] are silver bullets - these parental controls, kids can get around them,” he said.

“You have to teach them, like we learned the 'Safe Cross Code' years ago - we need a new song and a new way of thinking around the information super highway, as it's called.

“It's the same as the highway outside the door here - you wouldn't let your nine-year-old walk to school unless you had taught them very carefully about how to cross the road.

“[It’s the] same thing on the internet - you need to have that conversation with them, you need to be sure that your child will come to you when something makes them feel uncomfortable.”

“Unfettered and unsupervised”

Mr Moran said the situation around child sexual abuse material and online child safety is “actually worse than you think”.

“I'm not here to knock the internet,” he said.

“But we [at hotline.ie] deal with the downstream effects of perhaps naïve or reckless parental decisions that give kids 24-hour access to the internet that is not supervised or spoken about in any way.

“That is like letting your kid go down and run around the Luas tracks.”

Mr Moran said it is important to remember that if you are giving your child 24-hour access to the internet, “unfettered and unsupervised”, you are giving the world 24-hour unfettered access to your child.

The recommended age for giving children a smartphone in Ireland is 16-years-old.

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A child using a smartphone. Image: Aiman Dairabaeva / Alamy Stock Photo