Keeping Kids Safe Online

If you have kids at home you already know how difficult it is to keep up with what’s modern in their world. Why would you even want to? – some might ask but any parent will tell you that you have to be just as abreast as your kids and their peers if you want to have any hope of understanding them. Kids these days don’t spend nearly as much time planked in front of the television as they used to in days of yore – but that is only because the medium has been replaced! Kids are little geniuses in their own rights and it has taken then almost no time at all to get online and master the world of computing. Maybe it is because they are naturally less apprehensive than adults and that is why they are able to maneuver the use of the actual computer as well as find themselves in networking groups on the internet. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that kinds are just as, in not even more tech savvy than many adults and they are spending a lot of their formative time online. Just what are kids getting into on the internet you might ask? Kids are very much into research so if they like something, they will try to find out everything they can about it until they are completely fluent. Be it a song, artist or movie star, when kids sink their minds into something, they go all the way.

Additionally, kids are just as interested in networking with their peers online much in the same way that adults find it fun to do as well. While there are not that many social networking sites that cater for an under eighteen crowd, kids still find themselves in chat rooms and message boards as well as some video peer-to-peer chat sites. This may sound like a lot of fun and you may praise your child for being that social and involved but this level of socialization online is not without its downfalls. We read so many stories online about adults who get hood winked into meeting with people or sharing personal information, only for it to turn out to be a scam – children are even more susceptible to this fate. In a movie released in 2011 entitled Megan Is Missing, we saw just how young the kids online are and just how dangerous unsupervised use of technology (specifically the internet) is to our children.

What is being done to protect our children online when we often feel as if we can’t?

 

 

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