Our Story
It started as a passion to help families and our communities while volunteering
I'm a mum of two and an enterprise security architect. For over a decade I've protected multinational companies from the kinds of threats most people never hear about, the ones that make headlines only when they go badly wrong.
And then I'd come home, watch my own children move through the same internet, and realise they had no idea what to look for.
The gap I kept running into
I started volunteering at schools, teaching cybersecurity and coding to primary classes. The same thing happened in every room. Kids were quick, curious and completely unequipped. Not because they weren't paying attention, but because nobody had given them the words.
Most of us, adults included, don't learn the difference between safe and unsafe online until something has already gone wrong. We learn by consequence. That's an expensive way to learn, and a frightening one for a child.
Children face a second problem on top of it. When something online feels wrong, they often can't name it. There's no vocabulary for the uneasy feeling, no framework for deciding whether it's worth mentioning, no sense of who to tell. So they do what children do with anything unexplained: they treat it as normal and carry on.
A lecture doesn't fix that. Neither does a poster on a classroom wall.
Why a journal
So I built the thing I wished existed.
A journal works because it flips who's doing the thinking. Instead of an adult explaining what's dangerous, the child writes down what they noticed, draws what they saw, works through a mission and reaches their own conclusion. They're not being taught at. They're recording their own thinking, in their own words. That's the point, because the words are what they were missing.
Along the way they learn how passwords actually work, what a scam looks like before it's obvious, why personal information matters, what to do about unkindness in a group chat, and when a feeling is worth telling someone about.
What I didn't expect
The part that surprised me was what it does for parents.
The hardest thing about talking to your child about their online life is starting. Ask directly and you get “fine” and a shrug. But when a child hands you their journal, the conversation is already open. You're not interrogating them from nothing. You're responding to something they chose to tell you.
It has become one of the simplest online safety tools a busy parent can use: ten minutes, a journal, and a conversation that starts itself.
Where we are now
What began as volunteering has become a small collection: the journal, a family digital safety checklist, and hands-on paper circuit projects that bring a bit of STEM into the mix.
In 2022 that work was recognised with two awards in the same year.
Cyber Safe Together now helps families across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India and the United States raise curious, confident, cyber-smart kids. One page at a time.