Ask a Trusted Adult: The Original Verification Step

Guest Authors: Steve Shepherd and Samantha Meghawry

We're pleased to have been chosen by Sam and Steve to help raise awareness about these creatively written and beautifully illustrated children's books through both our Channel and Buyer communities.  We think it's important to help more technology leaders, parents, teachers and schools discover practical books that can start important conversations with children before potential problems arise. 

He went on to say, "That single instruction carries the whole book, and it's the seed of everything we've built since: learning to pause, question and check before reacting". 

Our first book, Miss-Information, opens with Fizz seeing something online that isn't true. Pixel doesn't tell her what to think. He teaches her one habit instead: stop, and ask a trusted adult before you believe it. That single instruction carries the whole book, and it's the seed of everything we've built since: learning to pause, question and check, before reacting. 

It's a simple message for a young child. It's also, in essence, the first line of defence in every security awareness programme any of you have ever run. Phishing training doesn't ask staff to become forensic analysts. It asks them to notice the pause point: does this look right, and who do I check with before I click? The instinct is identical. Only the trusted adult changes, from a parent at the school gate to a security team on Slack.

What strikes us, writing this series, is how early that instinct can be taught, and how much harder it is to install later. A young child who learns to pause before believing has a habit for life. An adult who's never been taught to pause has to unlearn a lifetime of clicking first.

We didn't set out to write a security awareness primer for children. We set out to help them navigate a playground argument about something they'd seen online. But the underlying skill, verify before you trust, turned out to be the same one many of you spend budget teaching grown adults every year. Miss-Information gets there first.