Protecting our kids online

So today I’m going to talk about internet safety, and protecting your family when they are online. To start off I’m going to cover only the real basic elements, I will be covering more in depth topics in future postings.

So where to start? Well let take a look at where your family computer is. A lot of people want to let their kids have their own computer in their room. I think that’s mistake number one especially if your kids are younger. The first and most important step to protecting your kids online knows what they are doing online. Keeping the family computer in an open place lets you keep an eye on their activities. I don’t mean spying on them; we’ll get to that later. I mean your kids aren’t going to do something they don’t want you to see, if you could walk through the room at any moment. Now I know this won’t work for everyone, but I think this really is one of the easiest ways of keeping your kids in check on-line.

Okay, but I work so the kids are going online when I’m not home. Well that brings me to my next point, “user rights”. All modern operating systems have some form of user right management. Typically you either have administrator rights, meaning you can do pretty much anything or user rights, meaning you can only do what the administrator lets you do. I know most of you have all ready set up multiple users on your computers so that everyone can have their favorite picture on their desktop, but what about the user rights? Your kids shouldn’t have administrator rights, they don’t need them. If they want to install a game, it should be a game that you know about, right? So that’s step two, give yourself, spouse, and maybe the older kid (16+) administrator rights, but if you’re under 16, then you’re just a user. Now you have much more control over your kid’s online activities and computer activities in general.

These are very basic and simple methods of protecting your kids online. Like I said early I will provide more detailed and in depth methods in future posts.