Are Your Kids Safe Online?

By Author: Jamie Hanson
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You try your best to make sure that your children are safe when they are in your midst. You make sure that they put on a warm jacket in winter, that they come home at a reasonable hour and that they eat healthy diets. But do you really know what your kids are up to when they log online? The internet is one of the greatest advents of the century, but the net is also turning into one of the most dangerous places for a child to be.

Email for kids is a great idea so that children can begin understanding the internet from an early age and they can use it as a resource as they grow up, but it can also be risky, and parents should be aware of the risk involved with letting children onto the worldwide web. With a tool such as a kids email service, parents have complete control over who their kids are emailing, and what emails they are receiving. It has multiple features such as mail monitoring, time restrictions and the ability to block specific individuals from emailing your kids. Such features ensure that your kids are safe and monitored. Internet predators are a real, severe threat to your children when they are roaming ...
... the web. Out of curiosity, many kids go into chat rooms and chat with strangers.

Internet predators can pose as very unthreatening characters in chat rooms, and through that guise they can coerce unsuspecting children into providing personal details, like what school they go to, their email addresses, home addresses or phone numbers. With these details, the wrong person could stalk your child, introduce them to corruptive material online or even kidnap them.

Internet pornography is also a huge problem. Pornography on the internet is a $2.5 billion business, and porn brings in some of the largest revenues in the country. Many adults and teens watch and use pornography, online, in paper, and on screen. The largest demographic of those who seek out pornography is the 12-17 age group. Porn is immensely accessible online. Not only is it easy for your child to find porn online with an unrestricted browser, but there is also a strong chance that they will stumble upon it by accident.

Luckily, there are ways for you to protect your family so that your children do not fall victim to internet crime and vulgar material. First of all, knowledge is power. Teach your kids from an early age how to be safe online. When you were a child, the first things that you learned were not to get into cars with strangers and not to cross streets without looking both ways. Today, while those lessons are still important, just as important are lessons about web safety.

Make sure that your children know not to give out personal information to strangers on the internet, never to meet people that they meet online in person, and never to give out their email password. In addition to teaching your kids how to navigate the web responsibly, you can employ parental controls on your kid's browser. As a parent, you can control the amount of time that your child spends online, monitor what they view and filter the content of the websites that they are allowed to see. With the right tools, you can protect your child everywhere, even on the internet.

Jacob Andersen received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brigham Young University and an MBA from Utah State University. He is committed to using his knowledge and expertise to keeping kids safe online."The safety of our children is the mission of KidsEmail.org and MyKidsBrowser.com," Andersen said."Any profits made are reinvested into the development and advertising of new child safety products."