Internet problems among young people: “They don't know about the dangers of the Internet”

Mrs. According to Dubras, “Parents should never hand over a phone, tablet or any other electronic device without putting a frame around it, not even a computer.”

“I've been working on Internet issues for almost two years now,” he explains. What I see is that our students come to Secondary 1 with devices they don't know how to use.

The youth worker notes that they “have no awareness of what the Internet is” and therefore use social networks and their devices without knowing the consequences of their actions.

He gives the example of the Snapchat app, whose ephemeral messages users send to each other through message boxes give the impression that they are deleted once the recipient has read the message.

“They think that once a message is destroyed, it is truly destroyed,” he adds.

“They don't know about the dangers of the Internet, and then parents give them the device and say, 'Hey, look, all your friends have one, so you go, you have one,'” he explains.

Mrs. Dubras then makes an analogy with the example of a driver's license.

According to him, just as one learns to drive to get permission to use a motor vehicle, “one has to learn to use electronic devices” to be allowed to use them.

***Watch the joint interview with Elise Dubras and Benoît Gauthier in the main video***