Just like the way you teach your children how to deal with daily traffic, it is important and also necessary to teach your children how they should use the Internet: under accompaniment and step for step. As a guide here are ten tips that can help you with teaching your children how to use the Internet safely. Success!
- Surfing together. Surf regularly together with your child. Parents and children can learn a lot from each other. Surf together to amusing spots for children.
- Set up clear rules. Set up clear rules about the use of computers and the Internet, such as the time that they can spent online.
- Keep an eye on the PC. Put the Internet-PC on a spot where you as parent are able to view what the children are doing.
- Keep Privacy. Give your children instructions to never supply personal details of themselves or the family to strangers (address, phone number, bank account-number, etc.). They are only allowed to do so with permission of the parents.
- Learn to deal with flames. Inform your children about the existence of flames (curse-messages). Teach them not to take these flames literally and not to react on them.
- Investigate their history. With young children it is useful to look into the 'history' of the browser in order to see where they have been. There is almost no use of doing this with older children, because they already delete their history, but you can try this anyway.
- Stay away from unknown software. Teach your children not to download programs of unknown sites and not to open unclear attachments (with incoming e-mail).
- Use a virus-scanner. Make sure that you have a reliable virus-scanning program installed on the PC, and update the accompanying database of known viruses on a regular basis. Ask your children to report to you when the PC is doing “funny”.
- Ignore filter-software. Don’t expect too much from filter-software helping you to block unwanted sites.
- Make your children aware. Make clear to your children that the virtual world isn’t a real world. What is presented as real could be something fake. Who appears as a woman could be a man in reality. Who appears as a child could be an adult.
Curse words and foul language are not only found on the Internet. The "virtual world" as you say is not a figment of the imagination. It is real, whether we like it or not, and must be dealt with as so. It is a means of communication in this age, and ignoring it as an annoyance will not make problems disappear.
Again, I'm sorry if this comment offended you. I actually enjoyed this article (as well as your other publications); however, I am becoming rather tired of people telling me that the Internet is haunted with pedophiles, unhealthy content and all manner of Bad.