On April 12, 2017, I made my first Instagram post. Caption: “First competition of the season,” insert smiling emoji, add a hashtag for the competition my team was dancing that weekend.

While this post now sits in my archives, it was perhaps the first piece of media that I uploaded to the internet myself. At the age of 11, I had started to create a digital footprint.

Digital footprints are built both actively and passively, intentionally and unintentionally.

Of course, posting on Instagram or adding a story on Snapchat contributes to our digital footprint. But so does clicking on a website, opening an email and other seemingly unrelated activities through which IP addresses can collect data concerning our interactions with the internet.

The online universe has created a profile on each of us. Our faces, our favorite stores to shop at and the people we interact with the most are all pieces of information that exist in the realm of the digital world.

As the first generation growing up with access to social media, Gen Z kids are building a digital footprint both earlier and more expansively than any generation before.

Children and adolescents, with their frontal lobes still developing, are bound to make mistakes in their youth. The internet is right there to capture all of the regrettable decisions we make in our childhood and keep them on our profiles forever.

It would be easy to say — just keep our kids off the internet.

However, this is impossible in the current state of our world. From a practicality standpoint, children cannot stay off the internet forever.

True, there are plenty of dangers and traps present in the internet and social media. News stories highlight the children that have been kidnapped by a predator posing as an internet friend — the most extreme cases of the internet gone wrong.

Many parents will remember the horrific news highlights, such as the story of Megan Meier, a 13 year old girl that was harassed and cyberbullied to death by a catfish on MySpace. The stories of Megan and many other kids like her that were targeted by predators on social media have haunted headlines since the early 2000s.

Despite these fears, keeping children off the internet would be doing them a disservice. Adolescents learn how to network, communicate effectively and build their identity through access to the internet and media.

As of 2016, a study from the Queensland University of Technology suggests that up to 50% of employers take the digital footprints and social media posts of prospective employees into consideration during the hiring process.

In this case, not only can having a negative digital footprint have an impact on one’s desirability to a company, but not having a digital footprint at all can be detrimental as well.

New social media platforms such as LinkedIn exemplify how social media can aid us in making important business connections and displaying our accomplishments for potential employers to see.

It is important to educate children about internet safety and the consequences of using the internet unwisely from a young age.

The Australian Curriculum has implemented digital footprint literacy and internet safety education into all grade levels. It is the job of parents and educators to ensure that — in a world where full avoidance of the internet is near impossible — they are exposing their children to the concept of internet safety.

On the internet, everything is forever. Each and every time we post or leave a comment, we have to be cognizant of the footprint we are continuing to build and the implications it will have on our futures.

Even though the internet enhances our lives in many different ways, it’s hard to just enjoy being a kid and feeling allowed to make mistakes as we grow.