Teach Your Kids How to Stay Safe on the Internet
In this day and age children can access the internet from anywhere. The library, friend’s houses, and school are all places that your children may access the internet without you being around to make sure they stay safe online. With the evolution of proxy sites, some children are able to get around the filters put on the internet at school, leaving them completely free to surf whatever they want. Most kids just use proxies to access MySpace and other social bookmarking sites from school, but they can visit any site, or view any of the pop up ads that websites display. Your children should know some basic safety rules of being online, even if you don’t currently have an internet connection at home.
Tell your children not to enter into chat rooms, because you never know exactly who it is you are chatting with, it could be the predator across town. If children are told not to enter into chat rooms from you, they will remember it when they are away from home and you are not around.
Make sure they know that under no circumstances are they to give out any of their personal information to anyone online. This includes their phone number, address, and their name.
Tell them to ask you first before registering to be a member at any website. Registering normally consists of giving the website an email address. Just let them know that you don’t mind if they want to sign up for a newsletter or a website, but you just want to verify what information they are asking for is information that is safe to be giving out.
And most importantly, warn your children about responding to emails from someone that they don’t know. Teach them to forward the email to your address or ask you to look at it before responding to anyone unfamiliar to them.
You won’t always be around your children while they access the internet so it’s best to teach them how to stay safe while online. It is our responsibility as parents to make sure our children know the rules of internet safety, and it is up to the children to follow them.
Filed under: Family Issues
