While it’s important to talk to your children about online safety, it’s not enough. Limiting your kids online activities – i.e., making rules about what sites they can and can’t visit, what chats they can and can’t enter, and what profiles they can or cannot place on the Web, are all crucial to their safety.
In fact, the ideal is to keep your child off social networking sites altogether, or to let them peruse and chat but forbid a profile. It’s just too scary for your children.
Limiting your kid’s online activities isn’t being an ogre despite what they say. It’s about keeping them safe. The appalling facts are that nearly 15 percent of the profiles on MySpace are for children 14 years old or younger.
Parents don’t limit their children’s online activities to the extent they need to, nor do they monitor what their children are doing when they’re surfing the Web.
It’s a dangerous place but one where your kids may spend quite a bit of time. There are many online dangers lurking out there but before you get too concerned you need to know that there are solutions to make your kids a little safer online.
When kids are old enough to connect to the Internet parents need to know a few things about what the Internet is and what can be done on the Internet.
Some parents think if they don’t have a computer or Internet access in the home they have nothing to worry about. This is not true and it’s like burying your head in the Internet sand. Computers with Internet access are available in many other places.
Good news for those parents who are concerned about MySpace safety issues.
There is a new kind of software being developed for parents who have kids using MySpace. MySpace is a popular hangout for teens and young adults. Unfortunately it is also a popular online hangout for adult predators who see the site and those like it as places to lure kids into unsafe relationships.
It can be done. Sometimes people get a little overzealous about MySpace safety and feel there is nothing they can do to protect their children. It is true that there are dangers and they are very real but you can minimize these dangers greatly.
First, do not overreact when your teen wants to look around a site like MySpace. If you feel your child is too young you can talk about an appropriate age for this type of thing and then always pay attention to how your child is spending time online.
