How to Help Your Kids Use the Internet Safely This Summer

Remember when you were a kid and had a book report due, you would go to the local library and hope you got there first before some other kid got the "good" encyclopedia? Kids now rarely have that problem since most kids have some form of internet access. When your child has a research project, the Internet is a vast information portal, a wonderful resource for both parent and child; there are many useful sources to be found, such as research libraries, news channels and even virtual museums. The massive online gallery of pictures and movies available online makes any school project so much more interactive. Since this generation of kids use of computers is intuitive as they are accustomed to using a computer for schoolwork, it is natural that they will want to use the Internet for activities such as socializing, shopping, homework, IM and email.

Now that it is summer kids have more time on their hands and likely want to stay in touch with their school friends that they do not see often. While your parents probably told you to stop watching so much television and go outside - now you are telling your kids to get off the internet and play outside for awhile. Parents however have justifiable concerns about how much time their child spends online, whom the child is interacting with online, and what content they are viewing. Even perfectly harmless activities or interests can absorb so much of their time that they have little interest in other activities, like playing outside. Your goal is to protect children from objectionable web content, email and Instant Messaging, specifically protect them from people you do not wish for them to interact with. And just when it may seem like the internet usage is almost over now that summer is beginning, but kids still have email and IM to contact their friends, as well as days they are just bored and want to be online. Summer may be a time that they are home more when you are not. This requires a safe internet plan for your children's summer internet use.

The first way to make your children's internet experience safer is to keep the computers with internet access in open areas of the house like the kitchen, living room or family room. A computer in their room with the door closed can be a risk. Set hours that your child can be online, and decide if that can include time you are not home.

The same principle about not speaking to strangers reasonably extends to people online. Decide together what kind of information is safe to give out online - first name, city or age may be too much information. Decide what kind of email address is too much information and who should your child give out their email to or not. Susie1996 as a handle or email likely tells people your child is an 11 year old girl. In tandem with a city or name of a school may be way too much information to divulge. Decide how much is too much for an email address, chatrooms, MySpace, flickr or any other forum your child might visit.

We all enjoy sharing photos with friends, but decide how much information is too risky with websites like flickr that often give too much identifying information about your house, your child's room, your city and street, even your car in the driveway with a visible license plate photo can be a risky way to give out too much information. If you must have photos with identifying information, consider instead a private service that requires a password that can be given out to friends to share these photos instead of being so public. Keep flickr.com accounts for photos you do not mind making public. .

If you do not sit with your child each time they are online, such as a preschooler visiting websites geared towards children like Sesame Street or PBS websites, there is always a chance for your child to be contacted, even if at random or by a spammer or due to the child giving our information about themselves. If someone scares or threatens your child, discuss a protocol to help them, explain you understand that they may give out more information than they intended and you rather help them than have them attempt to cope with the matter on their own. The internet is open to everyone, including people your child would likely never encounter in daily life, like prisoners and scam artists that might focus on those who are gullible and believe they can get a free gift by giving away their email and zip code. It is reasonable that children may need more assistance than normal in deciding what a dangerous situation is - many adults are dupped online - kids are no different. Free email services often sell the email lists to spammers, and even legitimate services may sell or rent these lists if you do not check off the box to state you do not wish for your email to be sold or rented. A child may post a question on a public board, they can be contacted by people they do not know and it does not necessarily mean they disobeyed the house rules about the internet. They may not even realize how much information they gave out. Regardless of how it occurred, a child must know that they can speak to you and you will back them up to resolve the issue.

Find out the internet access policies at their friends' houses, their school, and even the local library. Some public facilities will not prevent a child from accessing almost any website no matter how inappropriate. Other libraries will not allow them to access their email but do not mind other websites. Some are family filtered. Do you know the policy at your library?

Kids may not disobey you deliberately, but kids are curious. They may have legitimate question about a topic they consider" taboo" or are too embarrassed to ask you about and search on this topic looking for actual legitimate medical health information about topics that are natural for children to wonder about. Instead of the dry clinical explanation they might have expected, they very well might get a website with photos and information that you do not wish for them to see that is not even very accurate information or depiction of the topic. Set all search engine portals, such as Google, to the "family-friendly" filters to block any objectionable content. Depending on your concerns for blocking such content, this may require software to block websites that use certain words or have certain types of content. Parental controls can be disabled however if a kid is more internet savvy than you, so communication and setting internet limits may be necessary if this is your concern. These programs are not foolproof, but they are helpful. Learn to recognize the difference between Internet locations for playing games or chatting and places for getting help with homework, and learn how to use the "internet history" feature of your Internet Browser to see websites that have been visited. Programs like key loggers will tell you what your child is doing, typing and visiting online, but they really are an extreme step that is an invasion of privacy, so do not consider this just because your child is a mystery to you or you are just nosey, only consider this when you think your child might be in real trouble and the internet has something to do with it. Rebuilding trust with your child will not be easy after using such as recording program, think twice about any attempt to do so.

The internet can be a fantastic resource for your children, but does require that you as a family agree on terms for its usage.