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

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:

• National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
• Kidz Privacy - organized by the  Federal Trade Commission.
• Net Cetera - A guide for talking with kids about being online
• WiredKids.org -Filled with resources for parents and teachers.

• Yahoo's section for cybersafety.

• Getnetwise - A very good site filled with explanations

• Wiredsafety.org - 

For  you and the kids to try online:

• Take this lollipop  (Have them be already logged into facebook.
  Netsmartz workshop - Keeping kids and teens safer on the internet
• Online Safety from disney.com
• Don't believe the Type - a kids safety program

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: 

• Do you know who is the real person associated with each "buddy screen name"
• These programs can be set to "only allow chat requests from members of your child's buddy list"
• These programs often include a "profile" which can be announced into a worldwide "directory".  IF your child is chatting only with people they know, why do they need to announce themselves to a worldwide white pages?

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

• Yahoo's section for monitoring programs .

Contact me at 703-729-1757 or  Russ 'at' navigators.com  
If you use email, put "internet training" in the subject of the email.
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