Peace of Mind for Parents

The Internet has made our job of Parenting a lot harder. We all want our children to experience the vast wealth of knowledge available on the Internet and encourage them to communicate with their friends online and, make new friends. Unfortunately, the Internet also has the potential to expose our children to inappropriate material, obscene pop-up ads, and even sexual predators. In fact, research indicates that 1 in 5 children aged 10 to 17 have received a sexual solicitation over the Internet. This is definitely not something any parent wants to hear it is however, something we are forced to face.

The first place to start protecting your child is to look to your Internet Service Provider (ISP), such as AOL or one of many others. Almost all ISP’s have child protection filters that you as parents can use to stop your child accessing inappropriate content either by accident or on purpose. You should be able to use your ISP’s help feature to set up the filters and, this is not usually very difficult. Contact your ISP if you have difficulties and they will help.

We need to be as sure as we can that when our children access the web, they can do so safely. Internet filters are crucial to protect your children. In addition to the ISP filters, a tool that can assist us in this goal is Internet Parental Control software. Two of the top names in Parental control software are Content Watch and Net Nanny. The best way to find a suitable software program is to do a “Google” and enter “Child Online Protection Software” into your Google search bar. Ask your friends or your child’s School Teachers for recommendations and or advice.

Whatever we do as Parents, we must try to ensure that we show an interest in the Internet and its amazing capability. Our children are growing up with the Internet and they are taught about it in Schools which, some of us were not. This puts our kid’s way ahead of us in the learning curve and Parents have a duty, given the potential dangers, to at least find out about the risk’s to their children. Only by doing this can any Parent hope to help keep their children from the dangers that lurk on the World Wide Web.

An excellent way of learning for Parents is to sit down with the child and go into Social Networking Sites with them. If they will not let you join them, there may already be a problem. I will come back to this in the next article.

Dennis Horwood

www.dennishorwood.com

http://twitter.com/dennishorwood