Child Financial Harms
Children are exposed to financial risk at multiple points in their daily digital lives. Nearly one in five parents of children aged 7 to 18 report their child has experienced a financial problem online.
Online financial harms impacting children are becoming more sophisticated, more diverse, and more obfuscated. Online services are developing in ways which facilitate harm, in the absence of models that consider harm reduction. We aim to counter these harms and develop models that better protect children and inform more effective parenting in this area.
Definition
Child Financial Harms (CFH) are harms caused to a child through the direct loss of money, reputational damage, and/or introduction to financial behaviours which put children, their family or acquaintances at risk
Our work
We believe preventing CFH requires system-level response. As usual, parents are the frontline of that response. While we continue to uncover the scale and nature of child financial harms and exploitation, we are starting to consider how to build the defences.
From 2023 until 2026, Parent Zone led the Child Financial Harms consortium – funded by Nominet, the guardians of the .UK domain, through their Countering Online Harms Innovation Fund.
Working with The PSHE Association, UK Finance, Cifas, Dr David Zendle (University of York), and Reason Digital, ours goals were:
to enhance cross-sector understanding of online financial risk
bring together expertise from across education, finance, gambling and fraud
answer the critical questions about why, where and how we should respond
to identifying opportunities, test interventions and share learning
Join us
Ensuring change reaches families in their everyday lives requires innovation, collaboration and a deep understanding of parenting in today's rapidly evolving connected world.
Can you help us? Do you have research to share? Want to collaborate?
info@parentzone.org.uk
