Parental Controls- Your Responsibility
Everyone who has a child knows how difficult it is to start letting him or her do things and go places alone. Parents cannot help it; they are protective and cautious when it comes to their kids’ friends and activities. This caution that you have for your child’s safety should not only apply to their play dates and walks to and from school; it is important to make sure that your child is safe when he or she logs onto the internet. Having a kids browser is very important because the internet is the future, but it certainly comes with dangers.
The internet is home to all of the world’s information and knowledge, but unfortunately not all of that knowledge is positive and clean. Along with encyclopedias, games and media, the internet has countless ubiquitous pornography sites. The largest number of people who access pornography on the internet consists of children between the ages of 12 and 17. If you do not know how to monitor your child’s internet activity, this could be going on in your own home without your knowledge, because most people, especially children, keep their porn habits a secret. With unrestricted browser access, it is also very easy for your child to stumble across pornography online by accident. In fact, about 70% of teens online have accidentally found themselves on porn sites.
Porn is not the only danger of being online. Information transfer online is fast, so your child could be giving too much information to a stranger online without thinking about it for long enough. Strangers are dangerous in any context, but the internet makes talking to unknown people even more ominous because your child has no physical means of gauging their buddy’s motives. Without being able to see whom they are talking to, your child could easily mistake an internet predator for someone completely unassuming and safe. Without being able to monitor your kids email, you will not know if your child is talking to dangerous strangers online.
The internet is not always a safe place, but you can make it safer for your kids. You can monitor your child’s browser activity, checking his or her history and monitoring email accounts. Also, there are ways to set parental controls on your browser so that your kids can only access clean, safe material online. By making sure that your child’s browser is filtered and their emails monitored, you can eliminate the risk of your child being corrupted by unsavory material on the internet.
The most important thing to do when your child is getting online is to tell them about the dangers that they may encounter. It is your job as a parent to tell your kids never to give out their full name, address, phone number or password online to anyone. Additionally, it is important that your child knows not to meet internet friends in person if they are strangers, because there is no real way of knowing the identity of someone they have been chatting with online.
Jacob Andersen received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brigham Young University and an MBA from Utah State University. He is committed to using his knowledge and expertise to keeping kids safe online.”The safety of our children is the mission of KidsEmail.org and MyKidsBrowser.com,” Andersen said.”Any profits made are reinvested into the development and advertising of new child safety products.”
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