Be involved:
This is the most important item in this list. Be involved and consider activities that you can work on together. Play games, do research for school projects or on a subject of interest just for fun. This will allow you to supervise your child’s online activities while teaching her good computer habits.
Keep your computer in an open area:
If your computer is in a high-traffic area, you will be able to easily monitor the computer activity.
Set rules and warn about dangers:
Make sure your child knows the boundaries of what she is allowed to do on the computer.
You should also talk to children about the dangers of the internet so that they recognize suspicious behavior or activity. Discuss the risks of sharing certain types of information and the benefits to only communicating and sharing information with people they know.
Monitor computer activity:
Be aware of what your child is doing on the computer, including which websites she is visiting. If she is using email, instant messaging, or chat rooms, try to get a sense of who she is corresponding with and whether she actually knows them. Keep communications between you and your child open and let information flow both ways.
Consider separate user accounts:
Most operating systems give you the option of creating a different user account for each user. If you’re worried that your child may accidentally access, modify, and/or delete your files, you can give her a separate account and decrease the amount of access and number of privileges she has. See setting up parental controls in Windows.
If you don’t have separate accounts, you need to be especially careful about your security settings. In addition to limiting functionality within your browser, avoid letting your browser remember passwords and other personal information. Also, it is always important to keep your virus definitions up to date.
Consider implementing parental controls:
We already have two well written posts explaining how to setup parental controls in Internet Explorer and another how to on setting up parental controls in Windows.
There are other resources you can use to control and/or monitor your child’s online activity. OpenDNS offers has a free offering for family use, or you could consider one of the pay options that has even more features. See our article on configuring OpenDNS’s parental control features.
There are many web sites that are dedicated to this topic and we have linked to two that we think are excellent resources.
If you have any questions, concerns, or want to add to the conversation drop us a line, or post a comment.
