Is Your Teen Looking at Porn on the Internet?

With the busy schedules that parents have these days, it is getting much harder to monitor the children that we love. Not only do we have to worry about Myspace predators and Facebook sickos, but the Internet is chock full of sites that contain pornography and other images or videos not suitable for young eyes. So how do we know if our teen is looking at sex porn sites?

Monitor or limit the time they spend on the Internet.

If your teen is allowed, they will spend their entire lives on the computer - hooking up with friends on social sites like Myspace or Facebook, visiting chat rooms and forums, or playing video games. However, if parents lay down some rules, many bad things can be avoided.

For instance, if the computer is placed in a common area of the house, such as the living room or family room, your teen is much less likely to spend great amounts of time on porn sites looking at sex pictures.

Check your browser history often and install a key logger.

Your teen may be able to find sex sites on their own, but some of them may not know how to cover their tracks. If you check the browser history, you may just be able to see what they have been up to. Visit the sites that they do to make sure nothing funky is going on. Sex is everywhere on the web.

Another easy way to monitor what is going on is to install a key logger. These nifty little programs will record each and every keystroke made on the computer, and some even take screenshots for you. They are also password protected, so only you will be able to access the program. In this way, we are able to tell without a doubt what our teens have been doing on the computer.

Enable the parental control features.

Both the operating system and the Internet browser have parental control features, which allow an adult to specify what can and cannot be done on the computer. In enabled, it is much harder to visit sex sites and look at porn for your teenager. Do some research on the web browser you use, find out what actions can be taken, and take them.

In short, it is ultimately up to parents to know what their teen is up to on the computer. On a side note, mom and dad, if you are looking at sex or porn sites when you are on the computer, make sure you cover your own tracks, because that is a can of worms best not opened.