Making Your Kids Safe Online

The coming of the Internet has been a revolution. It has changed the way we do almost everything, from communication to shopping or learning. As long as you know where to look, one can find virtually anything online. But this hasn't come without its share of dangers. There is about as much good as evil on the Internet, and kids are mostly at the receiving end. A large chunk of stuff on the Internet isn't suitable for kids or even teenagers. There are predators on the Internet whose mission is to lure teenagers away from home for evil reasons. Keeping kids safe online is a problem that never stops disturbing the mind of the over busy and overworked modern day parents. In a bid to keep children safe online, parents have had to resort to several means of parental control. A lot of parents restrict their kids' time online, some use filters and other technologies to block potentially harmful content from their home computers, while others have resorted to some sort of parental control software that monitors kids' online behavior. What most parents, knowingly or unknowingly, miss out is the importance of educating their kids to the dangers inherent in the Internet. Thinking about what happens when a toddler plays with a knife would give us a clue. Ordinarily, you would try explaining to the kid why the knife is not a plaything. What is wrong, therefore with explaining to your much older boy/girl, why certain websites or certain online habits are wrong. If you are prohibiting your kid from something, he has got to know why, or the adventurous spirit in the teenager will someday push him to see what you are preventing him from seeing. The bottom line is education. Let your kids know why those 'sleazy' sites are 'out of bounds'. Let them know it is wrong to follow up with those luring chat-friends they make online and the dangers of giving out the house address or phone numbers to 'phoney' online friends. Tell your kids you are not only worried about them, but also about the computer. With this, you will not only be lecturing your kid, you will also be imbuing information security culture in him. Those Internet viruses, worms, Trojan horses and the rest are not completely new to your kids. They know about these dangers to the computer. You only have to reinforce this to them and put it in practical terms. If your kid doesn't know anything about these dangers, it's your duty to teach him and if you don't know, yourself, find out. All the information you need is out there, you only need to research. Remember that if you have to resort to the use of some of those parental monitoring software programs that records everything your kid does online; you may need to rethink your decision. If what you want to achieve is for your kid to obey rules, this software will probably be no good. What the software achieves is catching your child 'in the act'; this is more of a last resort, when all other means have failed. Is that what you are saying? The point still remains that, the more informed you get your kids to be about online dangers, the safer their online experiences will be. Those filtering technologies may achieve something close to this, since they inhibit potentially harmful content from getting through to your computer, but what about if your kid has to access the Internet from a friend's place where such devices are not installed? Make your kids safer online, let them know where and what to stay away from, and why. If you don't know, find out. A simple search will get you tons of information.