Helping children and teenagers to stay safe on the internet
There are many simple tips that can be used to help minimize the dangers a child could face while using the internet. Things you can do, and things you should teach the young child. Teenagers who have grown up with the technology are more experienced with hiding their use of the internet. This is dangerous and is exactly what predators rely upon to help shield them from the public. So here is our online safety advice for teenagers and children.
Children
- Position the computer so that it's easy for an adult to glance over and see what the child is doing, preferably with the child's back to the adult. This is important as it allows the adult to see what the child is doing usually without the child knowing
- Use trustworthy internet sites for children. Ask the school of your child for a list. This will ensure they are using quality sites with trusted material. There are many unscrupulous sites that use child-like terms to describe pornographic material.
- Search engines such as Google can have their preferences set for the computer to only show filtered results, both filtered images results, and filtered content results. This will help to reduce any adult material that will be found.
- If during a search, adult material does appear, deal with it, don't try to close it down in a hurry and hide it. Children will, sooner or later, come across adult content. By dealing with it in a mature manner will teach the children to ignore and deal with it.
Teenagers
- As above, keeping the main computer in a public place will help to reduce any wrong doings.
- However, with internet-enabled devices, the computer is not the only place teenagers can access the internet. Mobile phones, and portable music players (MP3 players, iPods, iPhones) are able to show the internet too, so as these can't be monitored, so well, experience shows it's best to instill responsibility into the teen about the dangers.
- Openly talking about the dangers of social websites such as facebook, myspace and Bebo can help keep such things in the back of their minds. To generalize, teenagers will usually believe people are who they say they are on the internet - within reason - but this need not be the case. Real-life conversations about any new friends met online, should keep a real-life channel for future discussions open.