How to Protect Your Children From Online Dangers?

With nearly 2 billion users worldwide, the Internet is a work assistant, informational platform and nonetheless an entertainment package for all. With this all, it is also known as a formidable tool that has a lot of potential risks. The Internet is a fun area but also a risky place where your kids can enter in a single click!

Young people are the most exposed population and most targeted by predators of all kinds on the web. In fact, children and teenagers especially like being able to interact and communicate with other users. They like to chat via instant messaging, playing online and participate in contests or surveys without thinking about the invasion of their privacy

THE DANGERS THEY FACE

• Pornography

3 out of 10 children are voluntarily or involuntarily confronted with offensive content on the Internet, while looking for a site or downloading illegally. The easy access to the Internet makes pornography a great concern to parents. Once it was really hard to get these images and now these are within reach with a click. So, there are chances that your kid can stumble upon these contents using a search engine, making a mistake by entering the address of a site or clicking on a link…

• Internet predators

Chats, instant messaging, e-mails are tools that young people are fond of but these may also confront them with sexual predators. Clean Internet anonymity encourages confidences and intimate revelations. This is what predators use to establish a quick relationship of trust with children who still lack judgment.

• Cyber bullying or cyberbullying

Cyber bullying means “virtual harassment” – the term that is used when a person becomes the victim of bullying, humiliation, mockery, insults or threats on the Web. Anything that can harm the digital identity of a person is considered virtual harassment. This often requires the creation of discussion topics, groups or pages (e.g. Facebook) to a person. These areas are favored by the absence of identity control and the public and open nature of social networks. The “stalkers” can act with virtual impunity and anonymously.

• Psychological pressure

Children can sometimes be extremely impressionable, and malicious people abound on the Web. This makes the internet a dangerous terrain regarding the many psychological pressures that may exist for them such as sexual harassment, incitement to suicide, anorexia, and mutilation…

• Misinformation

On the Internet, anyone can write anything without the contents being checked. So, it has an impressive amount of dubious information, worthless or false. Anyone can broadcast that, his ideas and personal opinions, so children must quickly acquire critical thinking and learn to verify the information they can find online.

• Violent or hateful content

The Internet provides access to a large amount of violent content with ease. For young kids and immature minds, the Internet is a window to cruelty where web pages are found filled with cruel humor, songs whose words escaped censorship, games of extreme violence and realistic, and the images or videos of torture and sadism. For some teens, such sites may seem as harmless as a horror film, and the border between good and evil can be impaired.
Also found on the Internet are all kinds of hate speech from the fanatical racism of the cruel satire. Hate groups are increasingly using the Internet to recruit young people, like those who advocate the supremacy of the white race for example. They use emails and private chats to address the most vulnerable adolescents, away from prying eyes.

• Addictions

Whether on a games console or on the Internet, the child can be confronted with excessive drinking problems and gambling addiction. This can sometimes lead to social alienation and dangerous financial losses. The proliferation of gambling sites has significantly increased the number of young people who play online. These games are easy to access, convenient and anonymous, an ideal combination to create an addiction among children and adolescents.

How to protect?

The continuing evolution of new technologies regularly exposes our dear kids to new dangers. The first step to protecting remains the parental surveillance, education, and prevention.

Parental Surveillance

In order to fight against all these dangers and protect children and adolescents during their web experience, strict parental surveillance is needed but then there arises a problem of becoming a snoopy parent. Also, the chances of not getting accurate information are high too. So, in this scenario, you can take the kind assistance of parental control apps such as FamilyTime, Norton Family, and Net Nanny etc. Using the app, you can:

• Monitor Web Behavior
  Track Browsing History: Keep an eye on which sites they visit for and stay updated with their entire Web behavior.
   Monitor Favorites and Bookmarks: View their complete list of bookmarks and favorites.

• Monitor Call Logs
  Contacts: Keep an eye on all of the contacts along with details.
  Calls History: Monitor the calls history along with the date and time stamps.

• Monitor Kids’ Locations
   Track Location: Stay in the know of your kids’ changing locations even on the go.
   Trace Location history: Keep a check on their whereabouts with the date and time stamps and see where they have been all day long.

• Monitor Kids’ App Preferences
  Check Installed Apps: View the list of apps installed on your kids’ device with the additional details such as app version, date of installation etc.

•  Monitor App Usage Frequency: Keep track of the time they spend on each app using the app frequency checker of FamilyTime.

Education:

Once you know their patterns of behavior, educate them the best use of internet. Educating and training of a kid are the responsibilities of parents. Just as they train their kid about the norms of School or Club on joining, parents are supposed to talk to their kids about the scams, emails, chatting and everything else that is part of the cyber world. Teach them in a way that they seek your advice every time they come across an unknown interaction. This can help you and your kids in diminishing the risks attached to cyber world such as cyberbullying, identity theft, crimes, identity theft and online pornography. It’s a must-have to train the kids about being a good digital citizen. Counsel them to think before using the social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Skype etc.

Prevention:

Education alone can do nothing you will have to take precautionary measures too. The best prevention can be carried out digitally with the help of these parental control feature:

• Watchlist Contacts: Watchlist any suspicious contact and receive alerts if contact is made by either party.

• Blacklist Apps: Restrict the access to apps you don’t want your kids to use.

• Lock Phone: Lock their phones to stop usage at inappropriate hours.

• Schedule auto-screen-locks: Schedule auto screen locks for specific times such as bedtime, study hours, and dinner time etc.

• Geo-Fence: Create a virtual fence around important places such as Home, school, clubs, etc. to receive check-in and check-out alerts.

Reduce Online Risk Smartly!

You can make the Web productive and risk-free with the ways discussed above. Online safety for kids is not an option instead it’s a must-have. Make them secure with the parental control apps and let them explore.