I was sitting on Facebook one night when a little status update popped up on my screen. My clever, 13-year-old cousin beamed from the photo:

"At home alone. SOOOOooooooooooo bored."

Zoe had just informed her 976 facebook friends that she was at home alone.

There are a number of things wrong with this. Firstly, although posting about boredom, Zoe had inadvertently told her friends that she was alone. While she had not posted her address, comb through her status updates for two minutes and you can get all the information required. ‘Elm Avenue Christmas Party’ there’s a selfie of Zoe with the kids in her street. A few photos on, there’s a first-day-of-school shot of a well-pressed Zoe and her sulky brother in front of their house, number 45 on the garbage bin behind them.

It doesn’t take much before a very clear picture emerges. Even though we post status updates and pictures as discreet pieces of information and even though we may turn our minds to safety, what gets overlooked is the reading of this "data" as a whole.

But who exactly was Zoe sharing with? What was she doing with 976 friends?! I’m not sure I even know 976 people. These are people Zoe has met at parties, at tennis camp, seen on the tram, friends who are friends of friends. She’s a pretty, vivacious young girl doing what kids do – collecting friends as we collected stamps, scratch-n-sniffs and rubbers.

The thing that troubles me is who knows who those friends really are? Because all it takes is a couple of cute photos of a young girl, some even cuter puppy pics and an introduction through a friend of a friend and bingo bango, the "friend" of Zoe’s real friend Clare-Crawford-from-horse-camp, has just become a "friend" of Zoe’s and knows she’s home. Alone.

We have all sorts of protection on our internet. It took my 11-year-old step-daughter less than one day to circumvent it. If my step-son uses his iPhone, he doesn’t even need to bother doing that. My four-year-old son has put a password on my phone and I’m not sure how. This is a generation for whom technology has changed the very way they think. Internet arrived while I was at university and altered how we corresponded, how we researched our essays. I have a "before" and an "after" point of reference. My step-children and children have known nothing but.

A couple of years ago, a fellow writer, Marion Roberts and I began to write Cry Blue Murder – a novel in part inspired by several highly publicised crimes involving social media. It is one of the first novels about the relationship between an online "groomer" and his victim. While we never intended Cry Blue Murder as a cautionary tale, it's impossible to write this sort of thing without being affected by it – and affected by the true stories we read during the course of our research. We read stories about children who had fallen prey to groomers. These were manipulative men who assumed identities and befriended children and teenagers on line – much like my example above.

I think the thing that shocked me most about this research, however, was the discovery that it could have been me. I was the quiet, studious girl who would have had far greater confidence corresponding in writing. I would have had a sexual confidence on line – a flirtatiousness I could never have mustered in public at a young age. I was also extremely naïve and trusting. I would have been the teenager who was no trouble, the teenager whose parents assumed she was in her room finishing an English essay, the teenager who swiftly minimised instagram when parents entered the room. And that terrifies me. Because we’re not talking about the mad kids or the bad kids, we’re talking about the silent, relatively easy, relatively sensible majority. We’re talking about my young cousin Zoe.

My co-writer, Marion Roberts has argued that "While adults exert more control than ever over the leisure activities of the contemporary child – driving kids to and from school to keep them safe from the streets, they are also often blind to the notion of ‘outside’ that silently and invisibly infiltrates their homes."

Roberts notes that the current generation has retreated indoors, favouring electronic diversions over outdoor play, resulting in a loss of engagement with the natural world. She argues, however, that the internet ‘…Is a form of wilderness – a world wide wilderness’.

In the words of the principal of a primary school I visited recently, the biggest threat to parents of teenagers and children is not bullying, drowning or being run over in the family driveway, as real and horrible as those risks are. It’s this: cyber-safety, safety in a world in which those requiring protection are far more capable with the weapon than the very people who should be protecting them.

So, what do we do about this as parents? My feeling is that we can't fight fire with fire. Unless we're IT geeks, we can probably never be as technically savvy as our kids. We can attempt to supervise access by getting rid of wireless internet in the house and having ports in well-populated areas (the kitchen), have passwords to our kids' social media and email accounts and go Russian on nanny software, but Zoe's mother did that too and although nothing happened, her daughter still posted home alone while she was at the supermarket. We just can't shadow a teenager as we shadowed a toddler. Nor is it healthy to.

If kids want to learn to surf, they need to learn to swim but they also need to learn to read the water. If they want to surf on the net, the same rules should apply. I think the best we can do is show our children the rips, the snags, and in this context, point to examples of internet crime, unpick what lead to the crime and hope that by doing so, we are arming them with the faculty to question, to trust only where trust is truly earnt.

A good place to start is http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/ , which offers helpful tips to parents and kids on staying safe on-line.

Kim Kane is the author of books include Family Forest; Pip: the story of Olive; The Vegetable Ark; andThe Unexpected Crocodile. When she's not writing, she's fighting the bed/bath/broccoli battle with her twin boys or laughing about the bed/bath/broccoli battle with her step-kids. Or reaching for a glass of wine. Kim's latest novel is Cry Blue Murder, published by University of Queensland Press.

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