How to Keep a Child Safe on the Internet

Though the Internet has become an indispensable part of our life, it is potentially risky for our young children. Fortunately, there are always some practical ways to guarantee the navigation safety of our young child on the Internet. However, our children should not do any Internet navigation without adult supervision.

Nowadays, our children start to browse on a computer at younger ages (averagely at around 6-7 years). Besides, almost every school has provided computers to its students. Therefore, it's quite natural that our children start to be greatly interested in computers and the Internet. But during their navigation, they may be exposed to offensive contents, such as pornography images and violence videos. According to statistics, each five children, one of them may be confronted with potentially traumatic content during their one-hour navigation. Even online games sites for toddlers sometimes contain links to pornographic sites on their homepage. Being parents, it's our duty to protect our children from the inappropriate contents on the Internet.

There is some so-called parental-control software that allows you to block the contents such as images, videos or text, which you do not expect our children to encounter. These software programs work with different filtering techniques such as word, phrase and syntax analysis. These programs use the key words such as sex, violence or drugs to filter the names of audio, video or image files, or block the texts containing these unexpected words. Some software can even analyze the images to identify those who may contain pornographic connotation.

Some programs use two lists to separate the positive and negative contents. On one hand, there is a white list that only lists the accesses to sites predefined by the corresponding editor in principle to the interests of children, and you have the right to complete or modify this list. On the other hand, there is a black list to block the accesses to certain sites or pages prohibited to minors or deemed inappropriate for children because of their contents. Unfortunately, you should realize that, software, even the most powerful one, cannot provide complete protection, since there are enormous amount of information existing on the Internet worldwide. Therefore, it is suggested to use the options framework proposed by the navigation software to limit access time to the Internet, for example, only when you are available to supervise your kid. However, your child should not surf the Internet alone without your supervision.

Furthermore, you should also block the access to chats, forums and downloads of music or videos, since they potentially contain illegal contents. It is also recommended to install a program to prevent disclosure of the telephone number, in order to protect your child and your family.

If your child starts to chat online with friends, you should warn him or her not to give out his or her personal information such as name, school name, home address and telephone number, etc, while chatting, which may cause big financial loss or identity theft to the family. This is the most essential thing to tell your child.