We posted an article and a youtube video earlier about the children's safety online. The article titled "Our Children's Activities Online...Do We Care to Know?" encourages parents/guardians to be more proactive and bother to know about what our children do online. Now we want to share the tips about how to keep our children safe online. Knowing what they do online is one thing and keeping them safe is another thing. The two compliments each other.
This generation of kids spends more time online than any generation
before it, which makes it increasingly hard to protect them from online
dangers. According to a 2010 study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 93% of teens use the Internet, and the National Crime Prevention Council found in 2008
that on average, adolescents 18 and younger spend around 18 hours per
week online. So how do you protect your kids without spending all your
time standing over their shoulder? Here's a quick guide to keeping your
kids safe online:
Open Communication
The biggest thing parents can do to help keep their kids safe online
is to talk to them about what they do, see and experience there. Keep
the conversation open, and be sure they know they can come to you if
they see or experience anything that worries them. If you explain your
rules and worries, kids will be better prepared to help themselves stay
safe online.
Filtering Inappropriate Content
Many parents worry about the material their kids are able to access
online, and with good reason. There are hundreds of millions of websites
online, and some are full of information that may not be suitable for
young kids or even older teenagers. In a study by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2006, 34% of young people reported seeing sexual materials online that they did not want to see. Many parents use parental control software,
at least while kids are young to block some of the less appropriate
material. Most operating systems (like Windows or Mac OSX) including
filtering capabilities, or you can add on a separate application like
Net Nanny to help out.
Social Network Safety
Though kids under the age of 13 are not allowed to have profiles on
most large social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, it's fairly
easy to get around this rule, and many kids do. Consumer Reports projected in 2011
that around 7.5 million of Facebook's users were under the age of 13.
We encourage parents to enforce the sites' rules about underage members
if they can. There's plenty of time for Facebook later. If you're
concerned your pre-teen has a profile he or she's not telling you about,
you can check your computer's history or use parental control software
to track activity.
Facebook also does its best to filter out underage profiles, flagging
users who mostly have much younger friends to be sure they're the age
they claim to be and responding when other users flag underage profiles.
For teens between 13 and 17, Facebook automatically imposes stricter
privacy settings than those it uses for adults, so be sure your child is
using the correct birth date on signup. According to Facebook's customer service department,
the profiles of minors are automatically hidden from public search and
Facebook restricts tagged photos and posts to just your child and his or
her friends, at the most.
Sharing Information Online
This brings us to the importance of talking to teens about sharing
information online. As many people have learned in the last few years,
blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other websites are public places, and
information you post there can and will be seen. Even after a post or a
photo is deleted, it can be hard to wipe it completely. For the sake of
their online reputations, it's important that kids and teens understand
that what they share online can form a permanent record. If they'd
rather a parent, grandparent, teacher or employer not read something,
they shouldn't post it online.
If you'd like to see just what your child's profile looks like to a
stranger or a specific friend, just ask your child to log in and then
use the "View As" link at the top of the timeline to see what shows up.
We also recommend that parents "friend" teens on Facebook and check in
to see what they're posting regularly.
While it's impossible to completely monitor everything your kids do
online, these steps will help keep your kids safe and informed while
they are on the web.
This article is taken from here
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