Parents
Welcome to MovieStarPlanet, MovieStarPlanet 2, and BlockStarPlanet.
We believe that a strong partnership between MovieStarPlanet and parents/guardians is the best way to ensure children a fun and safe online experience.
As children today often are both technically skilled and knowledgeable about online games and social networks, it can be difficult to know how we as parents can help and guide our children.
Below we have collected some tips to help parents understand the online world and how children interact with other children online. We hope you will find them useful.
Social skills:
★ Ask About Online Life
Ask your children about their online life just as you ask them about their day at school. For children, the two worlds are interconnected and equally important.
★ Interpreting Online Messages
Help your children understand the difficulties in interpreting messages online – where you have no body language, facial expressions or tone of voice to guide you.
★ Communicate Clearly
Show your children how to communicate without misunderstandings. Don’t write in anger. Show them how to say no, stand their grounds respectfully, and how to avoid conflicts.
★ Resolve Conflicts
If online misunderstandings do arise, help your children resolve these conflicts. This is a very important skill online, and here children often need adult guidance. If you know the other child in real life, involve the parents and have a conversation face-to-face.
★ No Bullying
Support a culture of inclusion and being nice. Follow and support the rule: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything”.
★ Be a Role Model
Children do what we do, not what we ask them to do. It is important that we, as parents, act as role models for children in relation to positive online behaviour. Children notice how their parents use online technologies and they take after this. Positive parenting includes teaching children how to behave in the online world. See the section ‘Understanding the Internet’ below for further information.
★ Online Purchases
Your child can learn about money from earning, saving and using the in-game currency, the so-called StarCoins. However, make sure that you as a parent are part of the payment process when you decide to use real money.
Understanding the Internet:
★ Make Clear Rules
Make clear rules according to your child’s age/maturity, especially rules about how to make new friends online. For instance: Should it only be children that you and your child know in real life? Or can it be other children as well, if you as parents say okay? Explain that, given the nature of the internet, we can never be sure who is on the other end.
★ Know How to Report
You can report another user or report inappropriate content to MovieStarPlanet’s Support and Safety team. You can also delete inappropriate comments from your child’s page as well as block other users. Find out how here.
★ Be Anonymous
Explain why it is important to not reveal personal information (name, phone number, address, etc.)
★ Make a Safe Password
Help children make a safe, hard-to-guess password and protect their user. Children who say they have been “hacked” (this is the term they use) have either shared their password with a friend, their password has been too easy to guess, or they may have forgotten to log out from a school or shared computer, or a computer in another public place. In these cases, the owner of the account will face the consequences of any inappropriate behaviour undertaken on their account.
★ Explain Anonymity
Talk to your child about pros and cons of not always knowing your online friends in real life. It can be fun and part of growing up to experiment with different personalities, but it can also lead to misunderstandings and conflicts.
★ Photos
Children have embraced the culture of sharing images online. Some of our games have a photo share feature that allows users to upload still images. All photos are pre- and post-moderated. This means that before a photo is uploaded, it is reviewed by a trained Moderator for breaches of the rules. Photos that violate these rules are rejected and will not appear in the game. The photos that are uploaded are also reviewed by Moderators as a means of checking comments by other users. It is important to always ask permission before taking or sharing photos of others online. Explain to your child that we must always respect a ‘No’. All users have to read our rules for photo sharing prior to uploading photos.