Technology and Children: Maintaining the Balance

Like they say about the brain that it is a great slave, but dangerous master, the very same principle applies to the internet. It is awesome until you use it for references and increase the knowledge base, but once it starts to control you, consider yourself doomed! The type and level of security depend upon the age of the kid, but it is very important to keep a check on the do’s of the children and keep an eye on the websites your children visit. Parental computer protection is as important as protecting your child offline.

Here are a few tips to protect your children online:

1. Establish rules at your home: Letting your child know the acceptable online behavior is the first very important step in safeguarding your child against the devil, the internet can prove out to be. The only time you can set up the basic regulations for your children are the pre-teen years. That is when you can shape the ideas of your children. At 16, the pre-teen years decide if the child is going your way or his way.
2. Give limited access: Setting up the number of hours and the websites and information that he is going to visit and limiting it to fixed amount helps a great deal to protect your children online. Children love spending time on Facebook and Twitter these days, which opens them to the predators present online.
3. Monitor your child’s activities: This is yet another way of keeping a check on the activities of your children. Remember not to confront your kids with what they have done. Rather, bring out other points and never let them know how you get to know about their activities. There are various programs available to monitor the activities of your children offline and online. Hence monitoring them is a great way to deal with your children and help them take the right path.
4. Keep the communication channels open: The weirdest mistake you do for your children is to close the lines of communication and the children see no way out of the situation they got into. It is important to keep the channels of communication open and use parental computer protection, which can be a very important aspect for securing your children. This way, you will not be worried much about what your kids are surfing through.