Internet Safety Rules For Your Children

It’s likely that your child is one of the millions worldwide who use the internet daily. Where once it was used primarily as a learning or research tool for homework, now it’s much more likely to be the place where your kids keep in touch with their friends and build social contacts.

Although that seems a better way to communicate with friends than spending hours on the phone, as a parent you should realise that online, things aren’t always what they seem. For a start, it may not be school friends that your child is communicating with, but people from all around the world. And therein lies the problem; online, a person can assume any identity they want. It’s important, therefore, to establish internet safety rules with your children.

As you may have seen on television, sexual predators often create an identity online to lure unsuspecting children and teens. They may draw them into adult conversations or try to get the child to meet them in real life. It’s important for you as the parent to set ground rules governing your child’s use of the internet, as well as monitor their activity online.

The first thing you need to impress on your child is that they must never under any circumstances give out their personal details online. This would include their full name and address, and also things like what school they attend or the name of clubs they belong to. At the same time, ensure that they realise that although the person they are talking to seems genuine, it may be that they are not. This is the most basic of the internet safety rules.

If you have taken a look at some of the popular social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace you will see that a lot of users have pictures on their personal pages. Think long and hard before letting your child post a photo or video of themselves online, and if you do allow it review it first. It shouldn’t be provocative and it shouldn’t contain anything that could identify where your child lives.

Online predators can be very plausible, and your child or teen must be made aware that it is totally unacceptable to meet in person, on their own, someone they only through the internet. Now it may be that it is genuinely a person their own age who wants to become a friend. If you feel that this may be the case, then you can go with your child to a meeting. Follow basic safety rules; let others know where and when you are meeting, meet in a public place and if possible take another adult.  

Set rules for the use of chat rooms and social networking sites. If your child is under 13, opt for kid-friendly sites that have a strong policy on child protection.  Have the pc in a main room of the house where an eye can be kept on your kid’s online activity. Ensure that they set their profile on a networking site to private, not public, and that personal details such as a phone number aren’t on the profile.

It’s possible to check to see what your child has been doing online. One way is to look at the pc history to see which websites have been visited by your child, although the chances are that your child knows how to clear the history every day. There is software available that can monitor your child’s internet usage by keeping a history of visited websites and instant message conversations. This type of program can also be used as a preventative measure by filtering certain types of websites so they can’t be viewed by your child (The best known is Net Nanny, find out about it Here ).

Tell your child or teen that they must tell you straight away if they get online messages containing sexual innuendo, threats or profanity. Don’t delete this type of message immediately because if the problem continues you will want evidence to show the proper authorities. Lastly, impress on your child that the rules governing online use at home have to be observed on other computers as well, for instance if they are using a friend’s computer or one in an internet café. 

If you follow these basic internet safety rules you will go a long way towards keeping your child or teen safe from online predators.