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Raising kids online can feel overwhelming—especially as AI, social media, and gaming platforms evolve faster than most parents can keep up. In this episode of the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide, Suzy Shaw is joined by Marcelle Lee, a cybersecurity consultant, educator, and mom of three boys, to break down what parents actually need to know.
Together, they explore real-world online risks—from predators and sextortion to AI-generated images and scams—while offering practical, calm strategies for teaching good cyber hygiene without fear or overreaction. This conversation helps parents stay curious, informed, and confidently present as they raise cyber-smart kids in a rapidly changing digital world.
Marcelle Lee is a cybersecurity consultant and educator specializing in cyber threat intelligence, network security, and digital forensics. She’s also a mom of three boys, bringing a practical, real-life perspective to online safety and digital parenting.
Marcelle is passionate about helping parents understand modern cyber risks—from scams and predators to AI—so they can guide their kids with confidence, curiosity, and calm.
The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Consult with a qualified professional for specific guidance.
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Raising Cyber-Smart Kids in the Age of AI: Cybersecurity Tips Every Parent Needs
Today’s guest on the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide is Marcelle Lee, a cybersecurity consultant, educator, and mom of three boys. Marcelle works in cyber threat intelligence, network security, and digital forensics, helping people understand how online risks actually show up in their real lives.
What makes this conversation different is that Marcelle lives it on both sides, professionally and at home. Today, we’ll talk about online predators, AI, and how parents can teach good cyber hygiene without fear of overreaction. Her philosophy is simple and refreshing: stay curious, not clueless; calm, not reactive; and consistently present, not perfect.
Welcome, Marcelle.
Marcelle Lee: Thanks, Suzy. I’m excited to be here.
Suzy Shaw: So, can you just tell us a little bit about your experience and how that might have crossed over into your home life- now that your boys are adulting or young adults? I have young adults too, and I think we’ve watched this whole generation come up with digital communications and cybersecurity, so give us a little background.
Marcelle Lee: Yeah, for sure. I didn’t start out in cybersecurity or tech at all. I had a completely different career in management and operations. Around 2010, I decided the cybersecurity thing sounded interesting and launched myself into a new career path. Now, I’m doing what I call my passion—I really found the right fit for me. But as I was going through that journey of transitioning from an everyday user user – just like many people probably who hear this podcast and probably you, you’re more savvy than most, but as I transitioned I did not forget my user roots and that’s something I’m also very, very, uh, well, I’ll say the word passion again, I should be able to think of something else, but very passionate about also is just bringing cyber security knowledge to, you know, just regular people, right, who don’t have that kind of training that I do now.
But as I was going through education training and whatnot, you know, my kids were kind of right there beside me while I was doing it. And as I learned things, they learned things. So I think, you know, having a parent in the cybersecurity space definitely engenders more informed children, um, they don’t want to listen to you. I think, you know, they can’t help, but notice, you know, the things that you’re talking about. So, so that’s kind of how it worked for me.
And in just talking about like, for example, like, oh, I maybe got a malicious text or email or something. And, you know, we have like a family conversation about that. What does it look like? What does it mean? What do you do? What’s happening?
Suzy Shaw: Right. Right. So the, the boys were getting their knowledge more by osmosis of, you know, the day-to-day conversations. Can you, can you think of a moment that, um, worried you and you really had to, you know, sit down and have a little bit more serious of a conversation or make an action in your house?
Marcelle Lee: So one of the things that I learned early on in cybersecurity is that, um, just an awareness of what devices you have on your network and we would call that like an attack surface. So, so what are all the different ways that, you know, uh, well, I’ll say a threat actor, but we could say a predator or whatever, fill in the blank for some person that you don’t want in your world, different ways that they could potentially get in.
So just an awareness of the devices and things you don’t even really think about, like gaming consoles. So maybe doing like an inventory of how people are communicating out in the world is a good step, but I did that and I ran what’s called an Nmap (“Network Mapper”) scan, like just like Nmap in my environment. And there were so many devices that like, I thought that maybe we had like, I don’t know, 6 to 10 devices in our house. And it was like, no, there’s way more things than that connected to the internet. And this is, you know, over 10 years ago. So now it’s even worse because, you know, we’ve got so many more Wi-Fi-enabled devices and smart home devices and I can literally be in my living room and I can see like the Bluetooth and wifi for my neighbor’s appliances and cameras or things like that.
So that was an eye-opening moment for me. So, just assessing what’s in your house is just super important because you don’t have the awareness, you don’t even know like what to look for.
Suzy Shaw: Right. And, and I remember initially, and I still do this now, but as the, the tools for the wifi services got better, you know, I would go through and I would identify each one and associate it with a person. And, and then I could put, I call my boys Ernest and Exuberance in my, my book and Ernest is a little bit older than Exuberance. So like Ernest’s devices didn’t go off until 10:00 and Exuberance’s devices might’ve gone off at 9:00. But like they would just automatically shut down. It was something I didn’t have to think about.
Marcelle Lee: There’s definitely baked in security controls like that, that, you know, many people are not even aware of, but yeah, what you’re describing is, is definitely something that can be done.
A lot of people will use, like in my home, I have a couple/2 different mesh networks and even within those apps, you can set all kinds of controls and things. So limiting, you know, that time of day usage thing is, is really key because I feel like sometimes it’s maybe the middle of the night when shenanigans are happening, right?
Suzy Shaw: Yes. Yes, for sure. You know, so when parents hear online predators, right, they imagine worst-case scenarios, and you know, the world has been, is changing super, super fast. So you know, what do you think that threat is today for parents, and do you have any practical suggestions for minimizing, you know, mitigating that?
Marcelle Lee: So I think traditionally we think of, you know, like maybe a teenage girl meeting a predator online and then meeting in person, and you know, what happens. I think that’s kind of what comes to mind in terms of like an image, but there’s, it’s so much more than that these days. And like, I wouldn’t even worry that much about, you know, kids meeting somebody in person, but I’d be more worried about, um, things like sextortion, for example. So maybe there is a compromising photograph that your child took or whatever, um, that somebody could use for blackmail basically.
Also there’s, there’s so much like spyware out there and things like that, where if you get spyware on your device, you probably don’t even know it, right? But it’s some malware, malicious software on a computer that allows somebody to remotely view your camera, maybe hear, you know, ambient sound in the room. So that’s another thing that I worry about, too, because if somebody does get that kind of access, they can capture all kinds of information and use that against the child as well.
And really just, what’s the word I’m looking for – cyberbullying is such a huge thing too. And I only know this anecdotally, but I mean, kids don’t tend to talk about being cyberbullied, right? At least not with their parents, and it can lead to, you know, devastating consequences, you know, or self-harm and that kind of thing. So, yeah, there’s plenty of ways that kids could be targeted and not just girls, certainly, but boys as well.
Suzy Shaw: You were probably had this relationship among your friends. I call my mothers of boys friends the MOB. So you were definitely in the MOB. And my friend group was the MOB, and the moms sort of had different roles. So, there was “safety mom” who was worried about just about everything. And there was a “road trip mom” who went off and took everybody to go look for fossils or something. And I was really more the tech mom. You were probably the tech mom. My background was broadcast television and media. So, I had sort of an aggressive, maybe style about tech and media and devices in the home, as we sort of talked about, and talked about it with the kids all the time.
And when they were little, we had the computer in the kitchen, so, you know, it was something that they could learn how to use, they could type, I could help them with it and just sort of keep an eye on what was going on. But as they got older, it became really, you know, more difficult because they’re doing homework and they have laptops and they’re in their bedroom.
And so, you know, what was your, you know, experience and, and what do you think are the, you know, the big lessons learned that you took away from that period?
Marcelle Lee: Yeah, definitely. So, it is really hard to have that sort of central computer in the house these days, right? Because everybody has a laptop or an iPad or a phone, right? And it’s virtually impossible to, like, monitor all those things.
Suzy Shaw: Well, once, once they hit a certain period, I think many parents are, are pushing back on when kids have access to that today.
Marcelle Lee: I hope, I think they, I know. I don’t really have, you know, I don’t know too many people these days with, like, young, young kids, but I doope that that’s the case.
Because it’s, it’s just, there, it’s like handing, well, this is going to sound so dramatic, but it’s almost like, like having guns in your house that aren’t secure, like just letting a child use a device without any kind of guardrails or monitoring or anything, is just kind of crazy to me. I can’t imagine doing that.
I will say, the spyware that I mentioned before, there is actually software that parents can use, which is essentially the same thing where you’re monitoring activity, but for less nefarious purposes. And then, you know, there’s things you can do about with the browser, having controls and all that sort of thing.
But I mean, at the end of the day, any kind of control that you could put on there, chances are your kid is going to be able to figure out how to get around that. So I just think, you know, being open and transparent and talking about, you know, just the importance of being safe on your device.
It’s almost like, you know, like when our kids were younger, probably, you know, it was all about stranger danger. Don’t talk to strangers. But now, you know, those strangers are in your house already and, you know, so you have to be even more vigilant than you used to be, right, because the actual stranger walking down the street wasn’t that much of a thing.
But, you know, our kids really learned that because we drilled it into them. So you kind of need to have the same sort of mindset for the devices.
Suzy Shaw: Right. So, you know, don’t open the door if you don’t know the person, right, means don’t click on a link if, if you don’t know who’s sending it to you or, or really take a look at who it’s from. Is that a legitimate email address or text, you know, message, right?
Marcelle Lee: For sure. I would say these days, I mean, I don’t know how much kids use email. I try to avoid using it, but it’s still such a mainstay, unfortunately. But, you know, text messages, there is 100% the possibility that a message could be, you know, malicious for sure.
It could be links or whatever. I’m sure, you know, many people have seen, for example, like the Maryland Toll EasyPass text messages, which are totally fake, right? And it’s not just Maryland. It’s all over the country, around the world, actually. But people click on these things, and they’re like, oh my gosh, I have to pay this toll.
And so, yeah, it’s super prevalent in all different kinds of platforms and also social media. I mean, kids are on social media typically a fair bit and malicious activity can come from that direction as well.
So I just, it really is a lot about education and, and just letting your kids know not to blindly trust, you know, everything that comes to them. Just like you wouldn’t trust, you know, that creepy old dude who wants to give you candy.
Suzy Shaw: Right. So, you know, now we have artificial intelligence, AI, which is, you know, ChatGPT and all these different platforms are jumping in full steam ahead. How is that changing the online risks for kids and what do parents need to understand even if their child isn’t on social media?
Marcelle Lee: Yeah. So AI is an interesting thing because it has a lot of useful uses, but it also has a lot of, you know, I would call them pitfalls, and especially for younger adults or children. Obviously, well, we know this, but I don’t know that everybody else knows it. You can’t believe everything that AI tells you, first of all, there’s, you know.
Suzy Shaw: It hallucinates.
Marcelle Lee: Yeah, exactly. Hallucinations are huge. I’ve seen it myself, and I use probably half a dozen different AI agents, you know, because different ones are good for different things. But so it’s, again, falls into the case of, you know, you have to be educated and smart about it.
But also, there have been a few cases now where young people engage with AI and, you know, you’re chatting with this AI agent, almost as if it was a person, and you can easily get lulled into thinking that you are talking to like some sentient being that cares about you. You’re not 100% just a machine spewing out what it thinks are appropriate responses. And there’s been some really sad, sad stories about, at least two that I know of, the kids that they killed themselves because they were having these conversations with AI about, you know, how sad and depressed they were and how life wasn’t worth living. And AI basically kind of gave them suggestions on how to end things and, you know, there’s lawsuits right now because of this. To me, that’s absolutely horrifying.
And we’re moms and boys. I know what it’s like to have your child not talk to you about personal things, but this is just really, really important. And, you know, you could say, oh, well, we’re not going to use AI in our house or whatever, but that’s a mistake, too, because, like I said, it’s a useful tool. And you’re also setting your child up kind of not for success if you don’t let them use the tools that are, you know, like employers want that, and they might need to use it in school. All the schools are kind of weird. They’re like, I have no AI.
But anyway, yes, so I think just understanding that AI is not a person, AI does not care about you at all and try to provide other people that your child could speak to if it’s not you. Because sometimes it’s tough to have those relationships, try to have some other adult responsible person in their world that they could go to to talk about things that they’re worried about.
But yeah, that’s the one that scares me the most is just where kids think that, you know, they’re talking to somebody, like I said.
Suzy Shaw: Right. And they think getting valuable mental health, you know, recommendations.
Marcelle Lee: Yeah. AI is not for that, for sure.
Suzy Shaw: So there’s a lot of settings, you know, that you can turn on or off in the AI. Are there any that stand out to you that parents should really take a good look at?
Marcelle Lee: So to be honest, I can’t really say yes with any degree of certainty, because I mean, there’s a new AI platform agent every single day. And like, something that might work for one platform is not going to be available in another platform.And you could also ask to see your children’s chat history with these things, because they store the history.
Another thing too, and I think this is less of a sort of like a family thing, as opposed to like a corporate thing, but in everything you type into these chatbots are going and getting stored somewhere and probably getting analyzed to train the AI to be even more, whatever. So that’s, you know, something to think about too, like, I personally wouldn’t put any kind of sensitive information into AI.
Suzy Shaw: One of the things I find the most concerning about AI from a multimedia standpoint is that you could put a photo in it, and it could alter the photo. And from there, so you don’t even have to have taken a picture of yourself in an unflattering way. It would imagine doing it for you. And then that could be used as blackmailing and bullying of a child. And you know, the communication part of that and having those open forms of communication with your kids seem like the only true defense we have. And you know, do you have any sense of this AI art?
Marcelle Lee: Yeah, sure. I mean, you actually just jogged my memory about something I was reading about recently. I mean, there are websites out there where you can upload a photograph and it will like peel off the clothes and make the person look naked. And I mean, there’s no law against doing that, apparently, because it’s not real. But yeah, so I mean, hopefully our kids aren’t sitting around already nude pictures. They do. We know this. It happens.
But you know, just being aware that somebody could take a picture of you that was totally, you know, a regular picture that you put on Facebook or Insta or something, and convert that to make it appear that you were nude, so.
Suzy Shaw: So if you had a, you know, a teenage, you know, boy at this point, those are conversations you would definitely have with them.
Marcelle Lee: Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, part of the tricky bit about this is that unfortunately, parents aren’t necessarily that savvy to these sorts of things either, so they don’t even necessarily know what to ask, what to look for. You know, I’m sure there’s plenty of parents that aren’t really even using AI or understanding just how many different ones are out there.
Like you could say, oh, you can’t use ChatGPT or check your computer for it. But it’s like, yeah, what about the 4,500 other ones? So yeah, so, you know, it’s and again, this goes back to like, I was saying, I’m just, I care so much about bringing this kind of education to just regular users, because it’s just not out there. I mean, if you work for some company, you might get like your annual checkbox, cybersecurity compliance training, but you know, usually that’s not particularly illuminating for real life type situations like we’re talking about.
Suzy Shaw: So last year, we did a podcast on Gaming: What Every Mom Needs to Know About Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite, and what the suggestions were for those different platforms. And it’s been really refreshing to see the companies behind, Roblox, for instance, increased their parental controls. YouTube has recently updated their parental controls. Communication was one of the things that the, you know, the guests for that program talked about a lot as well. But do you have any suggestions for teaching and modeling, you know, good cyber hygiene?
Marcelle Lee: For the gaming platforms? For sure gaming platforms provide sort of their own unique sort of issues. I mean, you still have the problem with, you know, potential predators. And it’s, it’s not uncommon for somebody to potentially try to groom someone through video games, right? They’re playing games and they’re pretending that they’re, you know, a 13 year old or whatever, but they’re not, really. So, gosh, I feel like I keep saying, you know, user awareness over and over again. But some of these things are really hard to control.
So, like, with my kids, our video game console was in the center of the house, like you’re talking about with the, with the computer, and I could monitor what they were playing, who they were interacting with, and that sort of thing, which I think is really important to do.
But, you know, again, as you said, they get older, and they move to different platforms. It’s not quite as, you know, out in the open.
Suzy Shaw: Right. So, let’s, let’s say your child, you know, comes to you and they have gone down the wrong rabbit hole. They’ve clicked on a link or a webpage or shared too much. What’s the first thing a parent should do?
Marcelle Lee: Yeah. Remain calm. Don’t overreact. Because at the end of the day, you know, the child has come to you to tell you this, and that’s really what you want to have happen.
So, I would say, just try to document as much as possible the details of what has happened. If they clicked on maybe a malicious link, then I would, I would actually immediately unplug that computer from the internet. Right? Because if it’s not plugged into the internet, then there’s not going to be any further activity happening.
Suzy Shaw: Keeping in, keeping in mind Wi-Fi, right? You can’t, you know, turn off the Wi-Fi or unplug the internet.
Marcelle Lee: Yeah, for sure. Or just turn off the Wi-Fi on the device. Right? So, yeah. So, disconnect from the internet in whatever way. And then everybody should have antivirus running on their, all their devices. Actually, I don’t know if you can get it from gaming platforms. I’ll have to look into that.
But certainly you can get it from mobile devices and, and regular, you know, laptops and desktop computers. Antivirus, you don’t have to pay for it. There’s definitely free antivirus out there that comes from the companies that do this for enterprises. So, they’re making tons of money off of selling it to companies so they can give it to free, give it away for free to, you know, the everyday user.
A caveat with that is if you just go search for, you know, Windows antivirus or whatever, iPhone antivirus, there’s malicious stuff potentially out there. So just make sure you’re getting it from a reputable company. And I could always give you some names, you know, if you want to put that, like in the show notes or something.
But yeah, so antivirus is really important and, and definitely on the mobile devices too. Especially Android. Like iPhones are a little more protected because it’s more of a closed system, but that still doesn’t stop you from clicking on links and things like that. So, I definitely recommend antivirus all around. I’ll say it until it blew in the face and, you know, it’s, it’s not going to fix everything or solve everything, but it’s a start.
So definitely, if you didn’t already have the antivirus running or whatever, just make sure that you’ve checked that computer for any kind of malicious activity.
Suzy Shaw: So afterwards, so disconnected from the internet, you know, run the, the health search, the virus search, just, just like if somebody got sick, you’d stick a thermometer in their mouth.
Marcelle Lee: Right. But hopefully they get sick in the first place because you had, you know, a vaccine or something. Right. That’s what it’s kind of like.
And then also, you know, say they, maybe they clicked on a link that didn’t say download malicious software, which is something that could happen, of course, but maybe they put their credentials into a website that turned out to be like a spoofing, a real website. So what do you do then? Then you want to immediately change credentials, preferably not from the impacted device, but like on another device.
And I will, I will mention here too, everybody should be using multi-factor authentication wherever they possibly can. And thankfully, it’s baked into more and more things these days. But what I mean by that is like, say you get a, you know, a login request or you’re logging into a site and then you have the secondary layer of protection where you’ll get like a text message or something with a code you have to put in, or you use some kind of authenticator app or whatever. This will really help prevent, you know, somebody who gets your credentials from logging into a piece of yours, so yeah, that’s, that’s definitely something to do as well. If they shared, overshared information, kind of hard to pull that back, but document it and be aware of where it was shared.
You can also report cyber crimes to the FBI. They’re actually really good about investigating even something that might seem small to you. I did this for one of my sons, they were, they did not get victimized, but they, somebody tried to do like a checks scam with them where they gave the check to him and then he was supposed to, I don’t know, however those checks scams work. We reported that to the FBI, and they did actually respond to it, so that’s, you know, where that documentation comes into play because if you don’t really know, so like screenshots, you know, that kind of thing is useful.
Suzy Shaw: So, you know, we will, in the, I post every single podcast to a web page, and we will include all of these tips in a way that’s accessible for parents. What other suggestions, which we’ll also include on the page, do you have for where parents can go for reliable information?
Marcelle Lee: Yeah, so there’s a few that I like, there’s, you probably know this one, but Common Sense Media, they have good resources, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has resources. There’s something called Cyber Safe Kids, ConnectSafely.org. I can send you all these, you don’t have to try to annotate them right now, so those are a few that just kind of came to mind when I was, you know, thinking about this earlier.
And then,just having conversations in your house about things that come up, you know, everybody’s going to get like that phishing email or a weird text message, talk about it and, and yeah, so.
Suzy Shaw: You know, normalize it, you know, not shame it, right?
Marcelle Lee: For sure. And what did you say at the beginning about something about not being clueless or whatever? That’s true. It’s true. Like, education is a, it’s a powerful tool, right?
Suzy Shaw: Right. It is. I said, “stay curious, not clueless.”
Marcelle Lee: Yes.
Suzy Shaw: At the end of every podcast, you know, I ask our guests to give a motto or something a mom could say to themself as they’re sort of tackling whatever the topic is, which, you know, today is cybersecurity. So what, what would you have to that?
Marcelle Lee: Oh, so I think my advice to parents is try to learn as much as you can because it’ll help protect you as well as your children. And ask questions, stay curious, and, and just, you know, I hate to say it, but just don’t blithely trust everything that you see on devices, because it’s just so mostly not trustworthy.
Suzy Shaw: I know, across the board, absolutely. And that was, you know, from just the pure media standpoint, not a cybersecurity standpoint. That was something that I had, you know, conversations with my kids for right from the beginning, was if it comes through that box, which is the television or the computer screen, it’s not real. It’s somebody’s opinion. So you have to validate whether, whether it’s accurate. So fact checking. I feel like we’re all professional fact checkers now.
Marcelle Lee: It’s true. Or we’re not. Some of us are not. Every time you go on Facebook, somebody’s spreading some kind of thing that is not true.
Suzy Shaw: So true. Marcelle, thank you so much for joining the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide podcast today.
Your tips are really important and I know that the MOB, the Mothers of Boys, appreciates having this valuable information. We’ll include it on our webpage, mothersofboys.life.
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And be kind to yourself, moms.
