Train your child to be “cyber smart” so that they can recognise potential dangers and know how to avoid threatening situations. Talk to your children about sexual victimisation and the use of the Internet, especially chat rooms, by paedophiles and child molesters looking for child victims. Encourage your children to tell you if they receive messages which make them feel uncomfortable or threatened, especially messages of a sexual nature.
Remember that your child might have access to the Internet outside your home, such as in a school or library or a friend’s home or even the mobile cellular phone. The more your children know and understand about being “cyber smart”, the safer their exploration of the Internet. Your supervision of your children’s daily lives to ensure their safety in the real off-line world must apply equally to their lives in the on-line “cyber world”.
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There are various ways in which you can protect your kids against, pornography, cyberbullies and the like. One of the best and easiest ways is by using a small but effective internet filtering software system that has been tried and tested.
Making your children understand that there are threats out there is also very useful and will help to compliment whatever software you chose to use. Communication between you and your child is also very important. Make sure that they are comfortable with speaking to you about anything - this way they will definitely come to you when they experience a problem and that goes beyond the internet as well.
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Keeping kids and even teenagers safe on the net is a challenge - it’s a challenge that you should face head on. It’s constant and never ending as more people are getting more used to technologies and finding ways to enter in to your innocent child’s life. There isn’t much that a non technical parent can do about it especially if you are a busy non technical parent! The best way is to buy a piece of powerful software that does all this for you. Something that you can configure once and have in consistently upgraded all the time by the people that you have paid to do so!
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Cyberbullying happens over the internet and mobile phones. It is harder to prevent because on the internet people can use different names in chat rooms, or send messages from temporary email addresses. The most common methods of cyberbullying include but are not limited too:
* chat rooms, blogs and forums – although many of these are moderated, people involved in discussions can be sent abusive responses
* text messaging – abusive and threatening texts can be sent to mobile phones
* picture and video clip messaging – offensive images can be sent to mobile phones
* email – new addresses can be set up in minutes and used to send offensive messages and images
* social networking and personal websites – messages and images can be posted in the relevant sections of these sites
* Instant Messenger – quicker than email, this allows users to have conversations
* webcams – usually used to view each other when chatting online, children can also be sent abusive images or encouraged to act in an inappropriate way while being filmed
* Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) – online software used by schools to enable staff and pupils to interact with each other, abusers can use the various forms of communication to send offensive images and messages
* video hosting sites – children may be accidentally exposed to pornographic images or even find themselves the subject of films being shown
What parents can do?
As with other types of bullying it is important for parents to listen to their child and react with sympathy – children should know that bullying is always wrong and that seeking help is the right thing to do.
Try the following tips to help keep your child safe from abuse:
* encourage your child to talk to you about anything that’s upsetting them
* make sure they only use moderated chat rooms
* get them to show you any abusive or offensive messages they’ve received and keep a record of them
* tell them never to respond to any abusive messages or calls – this is frequently what the abuser wants
* tell them to avoid giving their name, email address or mobile phone number to people outside their circle of friends and family
* change email address or telephone number if the abuse continues
* report any abuse to the police, your child’s school, the internet service provider, the website manager/moderator or the mobile phone company
* install computer software to ensure that you only receive emails from people you have chosen and to block unwanted images
Internet safety policies and guidelines can help make the Internet a safer experience for you and your children.
There are some simple ways in which you can assure that you and your kids can always be safe on the internet and ensure that your children stay away from the threats that can be found all over the internet.
Here’s how:
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Welcome to Best Internet Child Safety.
