Computer Spot

So there your kid is on the couch, being nice and quiet puttering about on the Internet on the laptop. He is a right before your eyes and not getting into any kind of trouble. Is he? Children under 15 do need your help learning stay safe.

They really haven’t understood enough about life to stay clear of on Internet. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children finds that while most parents do establish ground rules for how to be safe on the computer and have had talks about it all, they almost never look in regularly to see that their children really understand what they’ve said.

And one out of two children in America report that they don’t need any parental permission at all to get on the Internet and their parents never ask them to limit the time they spend online. These Internet safety tips for kids that follow should help. But they’ll only help if you check in on a regular basis.

Most children who get into trouble on the Internet have things go wrong the moment they give out personal information on Internet – their phone number or even the name of your school.

It’s not just that you need to tell your children to never give information out to anyone who asks. Often these days, they just disguise their intentions by putting out fake contests, sweepstakes or games on Facebook.

Anyone who wants to enter these needs to give out all kinds of information. Your children are fooled by the official-looking forms that go with these fun-sounding ventures. Most Internet safety tips for kids tell you to tell your children not to give out personal information. They never tell you the ways in which these requests come in.

The “Don’t give out personal information” rule can be surprisingly difficult to keep. For instance, what do you do if your child wants to learn to develop his own website? Most parents would look at this and completely approve.

What’s not to approve – it’s creative, and it requires a bit of hard work. However, do you realize that every domain name registration requires that you submit your address, e-mail ID and phone number, to be published to the whole wide world?

Of course, most kinds of domain names offer you a privacy option – for some money. Your child needs to learn why it is necessary to pay for this. And besides, there are some kinds of domain name TLDs that don’t even allow for privacy.

For instance, a .us domain name has no privacy option. A child needs to learn how to use these choices for his website.

Sometimes, Internet safety tips for kids can be surprisingly simple and still be very effective. For instance, a child needs to be sure to not use something that points to whether the child is a boy or girl. The name shouldn’t even point how old the child is.

With a few commonsense Internet safety tips for kids like these, safety isn’t really a challenge anymore.

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