How to Keep Your Children Safe Online

As great as the Internet is, it’s not without its risks. The way it works can potentially allow attackers to gain significant control over your life, and being careless about what sites you visit, what you download from them and who you talk to online can put you in severe danger. The problem gets even more serious when one considers that even adults tend to get misled by these attackers very often – so what’s left for our kids?

It’s important to ensure that your young ones stay safe when surfing the web, and thankfully, there are many solutions to this problem available nowadays.

Site Blocking

One of the first things you should look into is a tool to block specific sites from being visited. There are some advanced programs of this type available nowadays, and many of them are free too, while offering various advanced features like password protection and blocking specific subdomains of sites.

On that note, remember to take a look into what you’re specifically restricting. You don’t want to accidentally make your kids’ Internet experience worse than before. For example, some site-blocking tools may come with stricter filters by default, disallowing legitimate sites like 9gag.com and RageMaker.net just because they fall into a “distraction” category. This makes sense when you’re applying the blocker to a workplace environment, but not so much for your kids at home.

Timed Locks

You may also want to consider a tool that completely locks down the computer at certain hours to ensure that your kids can’t go on the Internet without your supervision. For example, you can set the lock to be active between 10pm and 7am, as well as when you’re at work during weekdays.

Just make sure that you don’t go overboard with this, as your kids should still have some private time to explore the web on their own. As long as you have something in place to monitor their activity during that time and ensure that they aren’t visiting any shady sites, it’s all fine.

Supervised Social Media Accounts

Kids on social media is a very controversial topic nowadays, and many people are against the idea for various reasons. But as long as you keep your children supervised, and you only allow them on Facebook for something like an hour every day under your own control, it shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Some things to consider in this case are who you’re adding as a friend on your kids’ profiles. On a site like Facebook, a person’s contacts can easily see their activity, which might not be ideal for some of your adult friends if they receive a request from your kids. Try to keep their social circle limited to their peers, and if you spot anything unusual going on with the profile of another kid, don’t be afraid to report it to their parents.

While it’s impossible to ensure that kids won’t stray off the safe path when browsing the Internet – and at some point they’re going to have to anyway – there’s still a lot we can do as responsible parents to minimize the risk and prevent something truly harmful from occurring as a result. Familiarizing yourself with the tools you have at your disposal is an absolute must

Thanks to Eleonora