It’s an unfortunate fact of reality, but children are the most victimized computer users on the Internet today. The good news is that there are some practical steps you can take to protect your children from sexual predators, hackers, and other seedy individuals who want to cause harm. This article will describe a few of them.

The first step in protecting your children at the computer is to prevent their access to passwords. This will keep them from sharing passwords with others and inadvertently enabling hacking into your system. If you think about it, there’s no reason why a five, seven, or even twelve year old needs to know the passwords to sensitive areas on the computer unless you’ve given them permission! In fact, children don’t need to know the password used to access the Internet either. It may be a hassle to type it in each time they want to get online, but it’s better to know the times that they connect than to have them sneak online without your permission and knowledge of their activities.

The second step towards protecting your children online is using the computer together. Siting next to your child while he or she peruses the Internet, you can guide him or her to make safe and intelligent decisions. You can approve websites and bookmark them together. You can monitor the conversations your children have with their friends and teach them appropriate online behavior at the same time. You can make recommendations and create a private time for quality time as well.

The third step involves blocking access to inappropriate areas altogether. You and your children may not always agree about what’s appropriate, but as a guardian, you’re in control and you’re ultimately responsible for their safety. Take the time to investigate software tools that put you in control and allow you to block access to certain websites. If you use an online service like AOL (America Online), you can use its internal Parental Control settings to block access to various chatrooms and websites. You could even block instant messaging and email from anyone who isn’t a fellow AOL user.

Other tools available online operate similar to the way that AOL’s Parental Control settings work, however no collection of tools could replace the reinforcement of mom and dad. Never let your children speak with strangers and never leave them alone at the computer unattended. Children just don’t have the experience that adults have and they don’t have the skills required to handle inappropriate conversations, emails, or images found online.

NOTE: Some of these tools include kid-specific web browsers that will visit pre-approved websites. Others include browser plug-ins that won’t allow access to online areas that contain forbidden keywords.

Another step requires teaching your children to never ever volunteer personal information. Under no circumstances, should children give their personal names, home addresses, phone numbers, or school information to anyone over the Internet regardless of the situation. In the even this information is required to enter a contest of some sort, be sure that you’re the one who makes the decision to supply it and that you’re the one who does it.

Performing all of these steps won’t be easy. However you can help minimize resistance to your monitoring efforts by explaining why you’re taking these precautions. Smaller children will probably enjoy the time you spend together at the computer, but older children and pre-teens may resent it. To help build a case for your concern, you might want to show your older children a few news stories that exemplify the dangers that unsupervised children are exposed to. The newspaper is unfortunately full of examples but with your help, we can reduce them world-wide.

The Internet is an amazing tool that people rely on more and more in several aspects of their lives. One of the fastest growing demographics of Internet users is children. Unfortunately, children are also one of the demographics most vulnerable to being taken advantage of online, making protecting children a chief concern of both parents and software developers. There are several keys to making sure children are protected when using the Internet.

The most important thing that can be done to help a child stay safe when using the Internet is to educate the child of the dangers that exist online. Children should know that while sites such as chat rooms seem like a lot of fun, that there could be dangerous people looking for pictures or personal information of children. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are becoming increasingly popular among teens, but users should take precautions such as setting profile pages to “private” to control who is authorized to view the child’s page. Personal information such as phone numbers and addresses should never be posted in a public place on the Internet.

One of the tools that parents often turn to in order to keep their children safe online is filtering software. This software is designed to examine web pages for content that might be offensive, inappropriate, or unsafe for children and to block the site from being accessed from a user’s computer. This software is effective and helpful, but should never be considered a replacement for supervision from parents. There are often sites that somehow find loopholes in even the most effective filters, so parents should still monitor computer activity. One of the downsides to filtering software is that pages that are inoffensive may be blocked, hindering the user’s ability to access needed information from a harmless website. Filtering software should be password protected so that children can’t give themselves access to the entire Internet.

Many parents monitor children’s Internet activities by tracking where they have been online. Checking browser history and other files stored on computers as users surf from web page to web page is a good way to make sure your children are staying away from harmful or offensive sites. However, many children who use the Internet are smart enough to know how to cover their tracks, so relying on tracking the history of web sites visited is not enough in most cases. Several filtering programs send parents a weekly report of web sites visited and time spent online, a more accurate way to track a child’s Internet activity.

Setting house rules for computer and Internet use is another effective way to protect children who use the Internet. Some rules could include keeping the computer in a public room in the house, limiting the time and hours each day that the Internet can be used, and maintaining a list of approved websites for children to visit.

A parent’s responsibility is to use a combination of all of the above tools and ideas to make sure their children who use the Internet are protected.