Parental control is every action done to provide a particular level of safety for your child. It can be applied in every area of a child’s life, but mostly it’s about protecting children from the environment’s negative influences. Today, parental control activities take place in the area of Internet safety.
Regarding the Internet protection, there are few tools available that can increase your child’s level of security while online. Software like antivirus, firewalls and parental controls for Internet access plus other steps taken by the parents can almost eliminate threat of bad influences coming from the net.
What Are the Methods?
Let’s start with the methods outside of the information technology solutions.
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Communication
Parents can do a lot by themselves in order to increase the security of their children for instance by an honest discussion. It is really important to explain your child what kinds of threats lurk while online and the bad consequences they can have.
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Teach Your Child
Next thing is to show the child how to properly use the computer and the Web. You need to learn for yourselves for example, by creating accounts on some social media portals. After that you figure out how the particular service is working and identify the things that can be really dangerous. Later, when parents know how does it works, it is the right time to transfer this knowledge to the youngest.
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Computer Placement
Another tip every parent of young kid can follow is to place the computer device in an open area at home. It can be the living room where everybody will be able to see what’s going on at the screen.
So to sum up methods different that based on software, we can say that to build an awareness of the kid what is good and what is bad is one of the most important goals regarding parental control.
Proper Software Can Help
Now I want to focus on IT solutions. First method and the simplest is to install an antivirus program. This kind of software provides security in terms of protecting the computer against the viruses that may come from the net and other data medium. Some of the viruses are able to steal our personal data. The similar job a firewall is doing.
It blocks any attempt to enter our computer made by other users from the outside. Last kind of software is a parental control. It is able to block websites that contain undesired content like for instance pornography or violence. It can also control the hours in which the kid is able to use the computer. Usually the parents can also distinguish specified user’s settings for particular user’s windows accounts.
Summary
As we can see there are plenty of methods thanks to which parents can create a safe umbrella above their loved ones. One thing we have to remember is the fact that it is not difficult to provide safety at home, the biggest challenge is to raise a kid that will avoid dangerous situations outside the house.
Thanks for the post. I think parental controls are important and parents just do not realize how important they are. However, many parents avoid using parental controls because they do not want to limit their own use of the internet as often families might share the same computer. They can actually create passwords for certain websites which would allow them to access websites they wish to access. Unfortunately, what we learned at home is that our kids are computer smart and far better skilled than us. They will know or figure a way of getting around parental controls. There are certain website rating tools which a friend who is very computer savvy who taught us about website rating tools and keyword trackers. Keep your kids safe from online harassment and things that might perturb them or are simply not suited to their age.
Thank you Karl for your comment. I agree parents need to realize the importance of parental controls and implements what works best for their family.
Gerardo