A Parent's Guide for Online Children The Internet represents wonderful opportunities and severe risks for children who go online. This page will help parents understand what some of the risks, and options to manage these risks. Download the presentation - "Safety Issues for Online Kids": safety_2006_09.ppt |
Shortcuts: Check your persona Right now . Make sure you understand what web masters know about You. |
The purpose of this page is simply to provide information to the parents of kids who are online. I believe that an educated parent will be in a better position to decide how they want to manage their children's online activities. I will not tell you what to do, or how to raise your children.
General resources:
Getnetwise - A very good site filled with explanations
For you and the kids to try online:
Need help convincing your kids the threat is real?
Sex Offender registries - Online lists of convicted sex offenders. Virginia's List includes current address, and color photograph. mapsexoffenders.com integrates this information into Google maps.
The next time you see an article about a cyber-predator case involving children... email it to your child.
Record one of the NBC Dateline Specials.
Possible Options -
Do nothing - ( the default approach?)
Access - Internet access - do you want to enable your kids to get online without your assistance, or do you want them to wait until an adult is around to log them in? Your Internet provider requires the use of a user name and password to establish a dial connection. If you have "save password" selected in the dial-up software, this means that anybody at anytime can connect to the internet without entering the password. If you have a broadband connection, that access is probably on all the time unless you specifically disable it. Some Firewalls include parental control options which can control when / where a user goes online.
Chatting Program settings:
Email Settings: If your child has an email account, they are receiving a wide variety of Spam - much of it intended for "adults". Investigate what filtering mechanism are available to block this. For example Hotmail offers a junkmail filtering option where the ONLY email sent to the Inbox is email from people listed in the address book. All other email is sent to a junkmail folder where it can be glanced at before it is automatically deleted.
Other software... You may want to keep track (or control) what programs you kids are able to download and install onto the computer. For example a music sharing program can be used to share your entire hard drive to the entire Internet.
Monitoring Software -can be installed to block or monitor internet activities. Some of these programs can capture every keystroke and image displayed for the adult to audit .
Getnetwise Tools for family - THE Searchable list of hundreds of programs to choose from
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