In this article I will talk about steps you can take to prevent your children from falling foul of the many dangers of the Internet. If you are inexperienced with a computer it can be a challenge to understand the potential risks involved. the first step is understanding what can be done and this is what I will try to explain below. It does not go into great detail but will hopefully give you enough information to help you get started.

The Internet is an important part of modern life and can be a great source of knowledge for your childrens school work and hobbies.There are a unique set of dangers to the younger generation and as a parent with limited computer knowlege you may find your children are better than you at finding their way around a computer than you are. Children often use the Internet for school homework, chatting to their friends and of course games.

I’ll start by listing the common dangers that your children may be exposed to on the Internet:

Grooming- A term applied to somebody (usually adult) making friends with your child online in an effort to arrange a real life meeting or to encourage them into illegal acts for their own self gratification.

Bullying and Intimidation- In my days any bullying and intimidation ended when you got home from school. Today children have access to their social groups 24 hours a day via PCs or their smartphones. Don’t underestimate how badly threats and intimidation can affect a child.

Pornography- It’s been around as long as the internet has. There is quite a bit you can do to prevent your child from finding this sort of material on the Internet, however it’s not a 100% fix. The best strategy is to monitor your childs computer or computer account and use some software to restrict where your child goes on the Internet. If you let them know you are doing this it will discourage them from any curiosity based activity.

Malware- In my experience children have a habit of trusting all software on the Internet and they are prone to downloading games or programs that are infected with Malware. Your anti-virus software may miss this sort of infection but you’ll soon know about it as the PC will start having problems such as slowing down or pop-up messages appearing.

Inapproriate content in games – It’s worth keeping an eye on the games your children are playing, especially if they are younger. With the modern graphics capabilities of most PCs animated scenes that include violence and sexual content can look very realistic. You child may be loaned an inappropriate game from a friend, or download one from the Internet. Most games that include violence and sexual content will have an age restriction much like you get for films, however a lot of them have free ‘try before you buy’ downloads that include a small portion of the game to encourage a purchase.

I’ve provided few tips to help you protect you children on the Internet below- If you are an inexperienced user you may need help in setting these up

Set the house rules – Set ground rules about use of the internet, email and texts. They should learn to take responsibility for their own actions and develop their own judgement.

• Make children aware that online contacts may not be who they say they are. They should only be chatting to friends in chat programs. If they have a facebook page there are settings that can be changed to limit who sees their posts. For more information on Facebook settings look here.
• Children must keep personal details private. Encourage them to avoid providing personal information such as home address, date of birth and school
• Ensure that they use a family email address when filling in online forms. Providing their email address when signing up to things online can lead to it being added to mailing lists for inappropriate emails. the whole family can use the family email address to sign up to things enabling you to monitor and control what they are subscriling to and prevent their email address from getting unwanted emails (spam)
• They must never meet unsupervised with anyone they have contacted via the internet. I don’t think I need to explain the dangers of this but if the online friend is genuine it would be a shame to prevent a genuine friendship from developing in the real world. Just make sure you organise, control and chaperone the first meeting somewhere in a public place. Don’t provide any personal information such as your home address until you are comfortable with the new friend
• Encourage your children to report concerns about conversations, messages and behaviours to you or another known and trusted adult. Encourage them to share their internet experience with you and make it a shared family experience.
• Ask your children to report bullying online, by text or phone immediately to you or another trusted adult.
• Finally threatening you child with the confiscation of their phone/computer if they do something wrong could be counter productive. I am not here to tell you how to bring up your children but punative measures like these may encourage your child to try to conceal any problems they are having.

Set up another Login for them on your PC – Windows has the facility to have different ‘profiles’ for each person who uses the computer. The profile is selected by the person using it when Windows starts up. If you have more than one profile Windows will stop during start up and ask you which profile you want to use to login. You will be asked to enter the password and then the profile you selected will load. Each profile can has different desktop backgrounds and their own unique email, documents, internet favourites and pictures folders. You can also set the security level of each profile to restrict what it can do. For instance you could set your sons profile so it cannot install any software onto the PC. When he has some software he wants to install he would have to ask you to login using your profile and install it for him to use in his. this allows you check the software is appropriate for him. It’s important that you keep your (administrators) profile password secret.

Set up an appropriate Internet Search Engine on their web browser – You can set up their Internet browser (such as Internet Explorer) with child friendly Internet search engine on it’s start page. These search engines will not return any results that are not suitable for children. Google have an information page to help you set up their ‘Safe Search’ that will filter out any unwanted results. Click on this link for more information.

Set up the built in Windows parental controls – Windows has some useful features that can help protect your children while on their PC. The features available to you will depend on which version of Windows you have. For example Windows 7 can do the following:

Set specific time limits on your children’s computer use. You can set time limits to control when children are allowed to log on to the computer. Time limits prevent children from logging on during specified hours. You can set different logon hours for every day of the week. If they’re logged on when their allotted time ends, they’ll be automatically logged off. For more information, see read the section about controlling when children can use the computer.

• Prevent your children from playing games you don’t want them to play. Control access to games, choose an age-rating level, choose the types of content you want to block, and decide whether you want to allow or block specific games. For more information, see Choose which games children can play.
• Keep your children from running specific programs. Prevent children from running programs that you don’t want them to run. For more information, see Prevent children from using specific programs.

For more information on how to set this up Microsoft have a training video click here
Install some parental control software

Although Windows has some pretty good parental control there are some software companies that provide a more complete product. These focus on stopping your child ending up at inappropriate websites. I would recommend K9 Web Protection which gives you excellent control of you childrens Internet activities and when combined with Windows Parental control features provides a comprehensive set of restrictions to control how your childrens computer activities.
Participate in their Web Browsing

Spend some time with your children while they are on the Internet and coach them on what to do if something inappropriate happens when they are online. Talk through each of the dangers described at the beginning of this article.

Nickris Ltd. would be delighted to visit you in your home and set up parental controls for you, train you how to use and monitor them. Our security engineer has previously been CRB checked and has government security clearance and is happy to provide documentation to support this. You can find our contact details here.