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Managing Your Children’ Time Online
June 2, 2008
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Summary When your Children are online, what do they do? What sites do they visit? With whom do they communicate? If you can’t answer those questions with a degree of certainty, you’re not alone. While we all agree that there are places to go and things to do online that aren’t appropriate for Children, some of us don’t know exactly what our Children are doing online. We should know, just as we should know where our Children are and what they’re doing in the real or offline world. And that’s what this article is about.
Common sense, talk and technology
To make sure that our Children’ online activities are safe, healthy and enriching, we have three tools at our disposal – good old-fashioned parental common sense, frequent talks with our Children, and technology tools that can help control and reveal what our Children are doing online. Let’s take a look at those tools.
Common sense
We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, the most basic way to monitor your Children’ online activities is to apply a little common sense. Here are two common sense suggestions –
- Put your computer in a public area of your home, not in their bedroom or any room where you won’t be while they’re online. All parents know how to watch their Children “out of the corner of their eye.” Do so when they’re online.
- Limit your Children’ time online. Less time online means less time to bump into or do the wrong thing, or become addicted to online activities.
Talk
Talk to your Children. Set the rules. Let them know what you expect them to do and not do –
- Tell them not to instant message or email with people you and they don’t know.
- Tell them to never give any personal information to anyone you don’t know.
- Let them know what kinds of websites you expect them to avoid.
- Make sure they know that they should tell you if something weird or unexpected happens.
Ask questions. Ask your Children to show and tell you what they’re doing online –
- What websites they’re visiting
- With whom they’re instant messaging or emailing
- If anything weird has happened to them online, and so on.
Symantec Family Advocate, Marian Merritt, has written an excellent blog titled “Start the Talk” with more detailed suggestions on this same topic. To check out her great ideas and parents' reactions, click here.
Technology
You already have technology tools, namely, your PC operating system and your browser software, to help you manage and monitor your Children’ online activities. Internet security software can also help you manage their activities and help protect them and you against malicious online activity. Here is a brief overview of the technology at your disposal –
- Your Internet browser provides a history log of the websites that have been visited by anyone using your PC. In Microsoft Internet Explorer you can just click on the View History icon,
. You can view that history and click on any of the websites that you don’t recognize and check it out. Be aware: history files can be deleted, and savvy Children may know how to do so. - Your browser also creates temporary files on your PC that can indicate what Web pages have been visited. In Internet Explorer, you can find these temporary files by selecting Internet Options on the Tools menu.
- Search engines, such as Google, offer safe search options that enable you to block, for example, explicit sexual content. You can find this feature in Google under Preferences and then Safe Search Filtering.
- Instant messaging and email programs also provide a history of contacts, communications and more importantly downloaded files. If you’re not sure how to locate them, check Help for the application.
- Both Windows® and the Mac OS® include basic parental controls that help you manage and monitor Children’ computer and Internet use.
- Symantec’s Norton 360™ and Norton Internet Security™ software provide a free parental controls option to give you even more complete parental controls. Both of these programs also protect your child, your PC and your personal information against spyware, viruses, and other malware.
Monitor and manage, but don’t spy
As you may know there is a lot of software around that is designed to let you spy on your Children while they’re online. Frankly, we believe, reasoning, talking, monitoring, and managing your Children are all more ethical, more effective, and provide a healthier, safer Internet experience than spying on them.
To learn more about managing, monitoring and keeping your Children safe online, we recommend
“10 Technical Questions, What Every Parent Must Do to Keep Children Safe Online” a joint production of Symantec and iKeepSafe.org.
