Safety should be employed for teens (13-18) and ‘tweens’ (10-12, also known as preteens), but safety conditions differ between them due to maturity level.

Tweens and those approaching adolescence, are probably most susceptible to dangers on the Internet. Some forums do exist for them to interact, with parents’ permission. Constant guidance should be employed, and discretion should be maintained when it comes to the display of personal information and images. Private profiles/sites featuring said displays are a good idea, where viewers are allowed only upon invitation. Many kids in this age range practice this police now.

As for teenagers, more freedom and leeway are allowed, as many teens are aware of the many dangers on the Internet, but careful and selective interaction is prudent. Also, images should not reveal too much. Some teens have been prosecuted for possession of ‘child’ pornography even though the respective subjects of the images were themselves.

When it comes to kids’ safety, exclusive chat rooms are very helpful, as sign-on software is especially designed to weed out suspicious or questionable individuals. These chat rooms not only provide the youngsters with playing fields all their own and with like-kind, but also promote constant security so they can engage and have fun in peace.

Cyber Predators

One of the most serious Internet crimes against children is cyber predator crimes. In these situations, children are targeted by adults online. These adults may try to lure children to meet them or pry personal information out of the children, using it to find the child later.

Many times these predators are gathering information in an attempt to abduct the child, with cases leading to not only abductions but also sexual abuse and even murder. It’s vital parents talk to their children about the risks associated with being online and the rules against corresponding with strangers or offering personal information.

Cyber Bullying

Cyber bullying is the act of a child or teen being bullied via online resources. This most often occurs via threatening emails or on social networking sites like Myspace or Facebook.

Often, peers will post rude messages or bulletins about other children on these networking sites with large populations of students being able to access the information and join in with more ridicule.

Cyber bullying is a serious matter parents should be aware of. It can lead to devastation, as in Megan Meier’s case where she was cyber bullied and subsequently committed suicide as a result.

It?s important not only to talk about what cyber bullying is but how to stop cyber bullying. Talking to children about the consequences of cyber bullying is often not enough. Teaching your children to respect one another and getting them to report any behavior to you they find inappropriate is important, as well.

Once cyber bullying starts your response may need to depend on the situation. Parents can?t usually turn to schools for off-campus incidents, even if the students attend school together because the law often says when schools are involved they are infringing on a student?s right to speech. So, parents often must handle the situation without the school?s help.

Parents need to have honest conversations with their children about what they see and do online, to prevent cyber bullying. Children should be able to come to a parent or another trusted adult if they are being cyber bullied.

By giving a child this open line of communication, a parent can help them deal with anything which comes their way. Parents should take what their child says seriously and be sure they act upon anything suspicious or bothersome to their child. In addition, parents should set limitations on children and teens regarding Internet use to avoid the possibilities of cyber bullying.

Keep any computers in the house in easily accessible areas, where you can see what websites your child is visiting, while you are standing in the room. This lessens the chances of them visiting sites you may not deem appropriate. The less privacy they have on the Internet, the safer they are, even if they don?t like it.

You can choose sites you feel are the most appropriate for your child to visit with programs. If the child tries to go on a site which is restricted, he or she will be asked for a password. Without the correct password, they will be unable to enter the site. This leaves you in complete control over their Web browsing.

Don’t keep the same password for long and change it regularly in such a way that is beyond your child’s imaginary powers. Giving your children access only to sites which do not have a chat function can be most effective when trying to protect them from potential online predators.

It?s important to be proactive, but teaching your child how to stay safe when they’re online is the best weapon you can use against online predators.

Online Scams

Many online predators are reverting to using online scams to gather information from kids. They may send your child an email stating they won a great prize and asking for personal information. They may also hack into a child’s favorite site with a pop-up frame asking for personal information. Children often get excited to know they won a prize and will many times enter their information with thinking. This can be a real safety breech!

Myspace

While Myspace is a great way for adults to communicate with their friends and family, it is not meant for children’s use. Online predators can target children who have Myspace pages. They can add them as a friend, which often instantly allows them to see personal information on the child. Children who post photos of themselves on Myspace can be in great danger of being a victim. Parents who allow their child to have a Myspace account should be very careful. Don’t allow your child to post photos. Don’t allow them to post personal information online.

Overall, it’s important for parents to constantly be aware of new ways online predators are targeting children. By being aware, they can be proactive and educate their children in ways which will allow them to avoid predators.

1. Chat Publicly: A great rule to abide to as a family is to only allow kids to chat in “family areas” of the home. For example, chatting in a family room or near an adult is a great way to ensure the child is behaving online. If you allow them to chat in their room (alone) they are more likely to disobey any chatting rules you’ve set.

2. Limit Access: To ensure your child isn’t meeting strangers, it’s a great idea to limit their access online. Only allow them to go to chat sites designed for teens or kids. These sites often go to great measures to ensure all language is appropriate and all members are underage.

3. Set Guidelines: Be sure to talk with your children about the importance of keeping all personal information private. Be specific and tell them not to tell anyone ANYTHING about themselves, where they live, their school, their sport teams or anything else.

4. Time Limits: Always set time limits on how often or how long a child can chat online. It’s great if you randomly mix up the times so your child can’t plan to “meet” someone they only know online at specific times. Of course, meeting a real life friend online for a chat is usually fine.

While many are great ways of providing interactions among peers, parents must be proactive in working with their independent minded teens to recognize problems before they occur and then offer them the tools to deal with the issues as they crop up.

chat room safety tips are posted by a majority of social networking sites, but observing them is actually the duty of the end user.

Teens need to recognize objectionable content and work with the social networking site’s technical support team to have it removed.

Explain to your teen that this is not squealing or tattling but instead a way of keeping safe younger users who might not realize what they are getting into and may find themselves in serious trouble were they to click on the link and become exposed to this kind of visual imagery.

Encourage your teen to have an online persona that does not necessarily link back to her real self. She might make up a name, a look, and certain hobbies and list them in addition to her own.

This way she may enjoy interactions with peers while at the same time throwing off others who are trolling the social networking site for personally identifiable clues that may point to the real identity of those posting there.

Finally, teach your teen not to fear being “uncool.” Giving out personal information in a chat room is dumb and it is preferable to be considered “uncool” than dumb.

At times the predator may have masqueraded as another teen and slowly built a relationship that way, while at other times the assailant was indeed a teen but did not divulge that the objective of the communication was more or less with the intent of personal sexual gratification or for personal profit.

Teens and chat rooms have become hot topics on the evening news, and by and large it is agreed that teens need to be much more careful. Just because another poster knows the current hip lingo, is in tune with the latest tunes, and also expresses an interest in the same teen heartthrobs does not automatically mean the person on the other computer is another teen.

Warning signs that should alert teens and chat rooms users alike are posts that ask in increasingly bolder and more persistent manner for a phone number, and address, a photo, or other information that should not be divulged online.

Similarly, if the person begins to message excessively and demands certain behaviors from the teen, it is time to cut lose that poster. Additionally, any threatening emails or personal messages need to be reported to not only the chat room administrators, but in some cases also need to be taken to the police and perhaps even further, depending on the content.

The fun can be swiftly blown away by the online predators that linger on sites waiting for the right details to be reveled for them to pounce on an unsuspecting chatter. As parents or simply as a teen there self, there are certain precautions one should take in order to keep themselves safe in a chat room.

One should stick to their user name and if you feel certain to provide your real name keep it on a first name basis only. This is done to prevent a predator from being able to search a chatters full name and to prevent a physical stalking occurrence. Chatter should also keep their work, school and home address offline for the same purpose.

Also keep your age true. Do not pretend to be older than you are and do not mislead someone about who you are. This is dangerous and illegal. You can cause great harm to yourself or another by playing this dangerous game. If in fact the chatter is under the age of sixteen they should have parental consent and an Internet safety discussion. Safety is key and anyone of any age must be cautious and prevent him or herself from becoming a victim.

Children have to understand the importance of keeping their whereabouts and personal details private. No phone numbers, addresses or other details should be provided online or by phone. If a friend does want to meet in person it has to be with a parent or guardian present. There are other dangers such as online bullies, sexual content sites and identity theft that should be discussed.

Your kids should know to stick to sites that they know and have permission to visit. Blocks can be set in place on your computer to keep out and prevent viewing of explicit content.

Rules and guidelines should be put into place to protect our children on the Internet. There is computer-monitoring software that allows the recording of all computer use. Instant messaging, chat rooms and website visits can all be recorded for safety tracking your families use online.

If you need help or information on how to best discuss Internet dangers with your kids there are websites such as websafekid.com that offer helpful advice and quizzes. Simple steps taken can keep you and your family safe on the Internet. Discussing these dangers and learning ways to prevent them from becoming a reality in your life is what keeps the use of the Internet successful.

But online conversations, especially when they’re one-on-one, can be much more intensive, and even older children can find themselves overwhelmed. Online predators can be very proficient at dominating conversations so that children feel unable to get out of them even after they’ve started feeling uncomfortable. You need to provide them with the tools to get the space they need to think clearly and reassert themselves.

Chat room safety tips for younger children should include always staying in public spaces and never entering into private, one-to-one discussions. Older children, however, have a greater need for privacy in all aspects of their lives and cannot be expected to adhere to this rule. It is therefore important for them to know how to take breaks and how to leave conversations they’re unsure about.

Discuss with them a set of triggers which ought to make them cautious about where a conversation is going. Remind them that these triggers should still be taken seriously even if they appear to be coming from people their own age (for instance, a peer discussing kissing) because people in chat rooms are not always whom they seem to be.

Many children find it difficult to walk away from a conversation when they want to. This is because we teach them to be respectful and to listen to authority. Online predators know this and will try to use these factors to control their behaviour.

Chat room safety tips should include making sure that your children also expect people to respect them. They need to understand that a genuinely friendly person will respect their need to take breaks or to refuse to discuss a particular subject. They should understand that they have a right to their own space, and they can use that space to think twice about comments and suggestions which, in the heat of the moment, might have sounded a lot more reasonable than they really are.

At this age, when the body is still developing, lack of proper nutrition can lead to long term health problems. Boys are at risk too, making up ten percent of eating disorder sufferers. For three to four percent of these children, ordinary dieting will develop into full blown anorexia or bulimia. Now, with the internet to focus their behaviour, those statistics are getting even worse.

Online precautions for parents should, sadly, not only be about protecting children from other people, but also about protecting them from themselves. As such, every parent should be aware of the risk which online eating disorder clubs can potentially present to their children.

Anorexics are notoriously secretive about their problems, so parents may not realise anything is wrong until they start to lose dangerous amounts of weight. Using the strategies shared by other sufferers online, they may learn to hide their symptoms for even longer.

It’s important to realise that anorexia and related disorders are not simply about food, they’re about control. Working together, members of these online clubs attempt to control their bodies and so control their lives. By sharing their obsessions they come to see them as normal.

Talking to other people with whom they can feel normal is naturally very appealing to children, so they’ll often side with their dangerous friends and keep secrets from their parents. Online safety precautions should include proactive discussions about clubs of this sort so that children have access to alternative perspectives and remain aware that their parents want not simply to take away their control but, rather, to help them.

If you think your child may be at risk of developing an eating disorder, it’s important to pay attention to their online habits. The longer such disorders last, the more dangerous they become, and the harder it will be for your child ever to live a normal life, even if they genuinely want to. Be ready to point them at online recovery groups to show them that there’s another side to their behaviour – people who understand, but who don’t ever want to be like that again.

Although children generally refer to themselves and their friends using their first names or nicknames only, they usually refer to teachers by their second names. This is behavior which is enforced at school as a matter of politeness and it can be a difficult habit to break in other environments. But by looking up teachers’ names, especially if more than one teacher is mentioned, it’s easy for an internet predator to establish where your children go to school.

Exchanging praise and complaints about teachers is a routine part of children’s social lives and an activity which they’ll be keen to extend online, as their interactions with teachers are an important part of how they learn to cope with authority and with the adult world in general. For this reason, they’ll find it difficult to avoid mentioning their teachers online altogether. As you won’t want to encourage them to invent nicknames which could be considered inappropriate when used in real life, the easiest solution is for them to refer to teachers by their initials, such as ‘Mrs. A’. They should be advised that this is the right way to talk about teachers in chat rooms, and that it’s different from real life. After all, the identity of these teachers will still be clear to other kids from the same school.

Keeping the identity of schools secret is among the most important online safety tips. By encouraging children to abbreviate teachers’ names, you help them to identify more effectively the sort of general information which they should be keeping secret in order to keep themselves safe.

It’s one thing to know what is and is not acceptable in a chat room, but it’s another thing to possess the social skills necessary to back out of a situation which is transgressing those limits. Many adults struggle with this, and it’s even more difficult for children. Since they lack the life experience which builds confidence and since they’re continually encouraged to obey authority, they can have difficulty standing up for themselves, especially against adults. Online predators understand this and take advantage of children’s uncertainties.

When you make a list of Chat Room safety tips, it will naturally include things like discontinuing any conversation which starts to become sexual. But how can children be sure when a conversation has reached that point? Predators often proceed slowly, for instance by starting out with seemingly innocent questions about things like height and weight and moving on to gradually more explicit questions about bodies. At some point, most children will start to feel uncomfortable, but they’ll probably also worry about causing offence by ‘jumping to conclusions’ in case the discussion really isn’t intended that way. As boundaries get blurred, they’ll become increasing vulnerable and find it increasingly difficult to back out.

It’s important to help children understand that they have the right to say no as soon as they feel uncomfortable, and that anybody who deserves their friendship will respect this. Dropping a conversation isn’t the same as making an offensive allegation, whatever other people may claim – it’s just about asserting their own right to set boundaries.

Although it’s wise to be wary of potential internet predators, they’re a lot less dangerous in a chat room than they are in person. Learning to say no in this relatively restricted environment, where it’s easy to call an adult for support and reassurance, will help to provide your children with excellent skills to make them safer in the rest of their lives.

They can easily be lured and tricked. Sometimes the only thing you can do, after you’ve taught them the chat room safety tips like not giving away personal information to strangers on the Web, is to watch what they’re doing and stop potentially dangerous and harmful behavior.

There are some noted Internet vendors that have designed software applications to help you keep your child safe. While the safety tips are important, monitoring the chat rooms they try to access is essential if you’re to be worry free about their Web access.

Windows has a product currently in beta called Live Safety. It has four key features that go beyond teaching safety tips, to blocking or monitoring chat rooms your children access.

The first safety feature of this online application is a set of filters that you have the power to customize so that they fit your personal values and your child’ age. It also gives you access to activity reports that let you know which Web sites your child is visiting.

The safety tips product has a live search function which helps to block inappropriate sites and allow only age-appropriate chat rooms and sites.

With this beta application you don’t have to deliver the chat room safety tips and then spend your time worrying that your child won’t pay attention or follow the rules you’ve laid down. With the Windows safety product your child can attempt to visit a blocked site and send you an online request for reconsideration and access. No matter where you are you can review each site, and decide to approve it or block it. All you need is Internet access.

You must sit your children down and talk to them about chat room safety tips.

Here are a few:

* Teach your children to guard their personal information arduously. Tell them they should never reveal their name, their age, their phone number, address, the school they attend, the city in which they live, anything about their schedule, or their online password, to any site, form or person on the Web that they don’t personally know. They should not be showing their picture online either.

* One of the most important rules that children must fully understand is the danger of meeting someone in person just because they have met them on the Internet. No matter what the circumstances and how well they think they know the person they met on the Web, your son or daughter should have you or your spouse or another adult caregiver present if and when they meet this chat friend.

* Children should not ever enter an online chat room until and unless the chat room has been visited and approved by a parent or other adult caregiver. Ideally the caregiver would be right there beside them as they chat. Reality is that won’t happen because your child, especially your teen, will sneak to chat. All you can do is impress upon them the dangers and the warning signs that the person is not who he or she says she is.

* Your child should clearly understand that a stranger who makes comments that are negative about you or your child’s other parent or guardian is probably up to no good. That is often how predators lure children, by empathizing with their rebellion against their parents and pretending to be a true understanding friend.

* Your children should not have e-mail or instant messaging conversations with people they meet in chat rooms on the Web. This is taking it to the next level of intimacy and it also reveals more about your child than it is wise to reveal.

If you can teach your child these chat room safety tips and make her or him realizing that it’s for their own good you’ll keep them safe on the Web.

You want to show your kids that you do know what these little smiley figures represent. You also want to be able to figure out what they are saying when they use them.

If you work in a place where Emoticons are used often you may want not want to be left in the dark. Emoticons are a great way to communicate with others.

Emoticons are fun! They can be used as sort of a code language that many other people will not understand. People really have a good time sending messages back and forth using Emoticons.

You are ready to join the new era of computer literate folks. Instead of staying behind in the Dark Ages you feel you are ready to come out from under that rock and accept the challenge.

Maybe there are a few people you have been wanting to correspond with but you don’t understand Emoticons. Learn the language and you can get in the game.

There may be someone you would like to surprise with your knowledge of Emoticons. There is no time like the present.

Emoticons are not difficult once they are learned. You can start with just a few basic Emoticons and add new ones as you go along. It won’t be long before you are a master as using Emoticons.

Figure out how to use Emoticons and you will be able to know what is going on, join the computer savvy, correspond with other who use them and even surprise a person or two!