[Solved] How closely should I monitor my child's internet use?

Are there any fool-proof tools for blocking online gambling sites and sites with explicit content? Or do I just have to watch what the kids are doing?

There are software tools like Net Nanny, or you can change service provider - some are now offering "protected" connections. However, my daughter is 6 and she never gets past the CBBibbes site - sorry!

hi all Im very new to the dad talk info but I feel this subject is a huge one, as alot of parents don't monitor what there children do online which is very scary as i've seen some of the things my younger cousins do online (nothing over the top) but it has me thinking that there are youth/kids who are doing a lot worse and I think its something that defiantly needs monitoring.

We have a rule about the door always being open on the room to the little study we have... We make sure we go in regularly... or if the kids use my work laptop its in the front room.. I know we talked about this in front of another parent a couple of years ago, and she thought we were over the top and felt confident about her teenage daughter having the pm (wit webcam) in her bedroom... Anyway she came back to us the next week saying she'd gone into her daughters room to find her scantily clad in front of the webcam chatting to an older guy! Needless to say the PC found its way downstairs... can't quite remember the story but it might have found its way via the bedroom window.... 😐

There is an article on online safety on the site : http://www.dadtalk.co.uk/articles/online_safety.php it does cover some of this stuff

Buzz

My youngest daughter has 2 email accounts - one of which I set up on a domain name I own. This one is the one I ask her to use for certain things, like setting up things like club penguin - the reason I gave her is that if she starts getting any dubious emails, I can simply shut the account down to stop it. What she doesn't know is that any emails that come into this account are invisibly copied to me so I can keep and eye on things. The other email account is a hotmail account which I have no control over, but this is for contact with her circle of friends, and I don't think it would be appropriate for me to monitor this anyway.

As for webcams - I'm not greatly in favour of them, and none of my children have them. I don't see that they greatly improve communication with their friends so the problem never arises in my home.

I did the same thing for my teenager, allowing an email address, but to be monitored. I did however make them aware of the watch I have over the account. There does not seem to be an issue or any sneaking around. . .. yet

Hi all

I have attached a couple of videos from You Tube - you will need to watch them all the way through as the message is strong but is very worrying. It certainly made me look at the way my kids surf the net.

They were produced by the "Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre" and they are a must for every parent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK5OeGeudBM&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o8auwnJtqE&feature=channel

Mario

Those youtube links were pretty scary,it's one of those things you will probally think it won't happen to my kids but it can.

On the issue of monitering your kids internet access,I have a 14 yr old step-son and we had an issue about 2yrs ago where he'd had a couple of friends round,they were in his room and were looking/downloading some porn off Limewire and I don't know if anyones used the site but it's crazy as you'll put in a music artist for example and you'll also get some porn come up 😕 ? ,the big problem this particular time was some of the titles that had come up were pretty graphic/sick really,im sure they didn't mean to download these particular titles but they did. We obviously read the riot act and turned his internet off for a while,my big concern was that if the unthinkable happened and there was a knock at the door the powers that be might not believe it was kids messing around with stuff they don't understand,they would think it was me.

Now he doesn't download stuff and every now and again me or my wife will have a look at his computer,I think we really scared him that time and we havn't had any problems like that for ages now.

I think the internet is a great thing but can also be a real problem.

my other half has a 17 year old daughter who lives with us, since she was about 12 we have let her have very limited internet use, we bought her a laptop for her 14th and let her have free run with it but i also installed a spy program to monitor her activity without her knowing i would then check it at night when she had gone to bed within 4 days of her having the laptop we found that when she was supposed to be doing her homework she was spending a measly 3 mins on her homework and 2 hours playing on the internet, when asked about it she outright lied ( she's a compulsive liar anyways ) about it and so the laptop was taken off her and since then she can only use it for doing her school/collage work but she must do it in our pressence at least that way we know she's doing her work.
As we have had trust issues with my partners daughter for the past serval years we have felt that it too dangerous to let her have unrestricated access to the internet as we could not guarentee we would get the truth from her about anything and she is very easily led as well making her a nice easy target for online predators.

My feeling with this is that it has done her no harm what so ever.

clarkkent, me being a geek, what software did you use? I thankfully don't have an issue yet, but my daugther (7) has just started playing a game called Moshi Monsters - and reminded me that I really need to spend some time digging into this sort of software.
(which is independent of how I communicate that to her!)

Hi Batman

Most good kids websites ask for parent permission first and they have a parents area so you can look to see what the fuss is about. It is worth spending 20 minutes with your daughter asking her to show you the website.

She will think you are interested but actually you are monitoring the site.

Mario

Are there any fool-proof tools for blocking online gambling sites and sites with explicit content? Or do I just have to watch what the kids are doing?

There are no foolproof tools but there are some really great tools.

K9 Web Protection is one we have used for some time. It works on both Mac and PCs and best of all its Free. Yep really free. No strings. A bit like AVG antivirus. The company make their money from business. It puts very little overhead on the computer and works really well.

Personally I feel that controlling the amount of time spent online is as important as where they can get to. Boredom + Internet = Trouble. I use Computer Time for this on the PC. This is not free but really good value. :ugeek:

Hi Ribbleroo

Welcome to the forum, and thanks for that information - I may well have a look at that myself in the near future. 😀

luckily for us at the moment, our 5 year old rarely goes on the internet and only uses things like cbeebies and nick jnr websites. The computer is in our living room so we always have site of what he is up to.

An idea has occured to me though that i may set up a seperate limited user account for him and change the administrator account password so he cant access it.

The idea would be as an administrator i can block websites using firewall software, so when he logs in under his limited user account he wont have access to those sites hopefully this will make it safer for him to surf the net

also you can use firewall settings to block applications too, this might get round downloading things they shouldnt using thinkgs like limewire or torrents etc

My boys are 4 years old and 8 months old respectively, and man alive, I'm terrified for when they get to the stage of wanting to go online.

I'm only young myself - 23, although with the haggard expression that comes with two kids you'd never think it to look at me - so my teenage years were spent almost entirely online. Forums, computer games, chat rooms, MSN - and thats not even mentioning literally thousands of hours spent looking at porn...

Kids don't need email accounts other than the ones schools provide. Teenagers may want access to social networks, and provided that parents are on-top of account privacy settings then the risk is limited and that's okay. But from my own personal experience, giving kids computer access in their bedrooms means that you won't be able to keep them safe from the internet because teenagers inherently want to take risks.

For online safety issues remember to check out our DadTalk articles in the Child Safety section. Thought I would provide you with some links.

Online Safety

Safety yes, Snopping no

Gooner

Internet filters have always been one of those things I have thought about and planned to do at the appropriate time, you know about 12, 13yrs old or somewhere around that sort of age. Well that was all well and good until a couple of months ago...

My 7yr old has only ever gone to Cbbc or cartoon network or bbc sport....so smug me never thought about it and the laptop must always be used in the lounge or kitchen, never upstairs.

So the day he asked if he could use it upstairs, I of course said "No! We only use it downstairs, you know the rules" and thought no more about it. That is until his younger sister said later that day in the car "Dad I saw a girl kissing a man's......."

You imagine the rest of the sentence, you will be right I am sure. My face dropped and got on the phone to the wife to tell her to shut down the computer and tell her what had happened. Shock, horror and all other such words were me on the drive back home.

Well had a chat with the little man about what he had watched and worse shown his sister. He told me he came across it by accident via a search engine. He has never mentioned again and neither has his sister.

Have implemented the windows family safety monitor now and ensured that the main search engines do have their filters set. Geez the life of a father. The fact that such is so freely available means that I will have to have some sort of conversation with him as he gets older about the portrayal of men and women in such videos on the internet. The old story of magazines under the bed, seem so dated in comparison.

Not going to close my eyes to the fact that just because I do not allow it, he will still get the chance to see it somewhere.

Luckily my little man is only 18 months old so I won't have to worry about this for next few years. However, being the tech support person in the family, my sister and a cousin asked me to setup something so their kids couldn't visit dodgy sites. As I've been in IT field for well over 10 years, my preference was to setup hardware firewall rather than setting up firewalls on individual PCs/laptops. Both of them had basic firewall built into their routers so I setup the router firewall in such a way which prevented them from visiting sites which had words like p0rn, s ex etc..
I've two main reasons for going for hardware based firewall. You don't have to install firewall on individual PCs/laptops etc.. and secondly these days kids have smartphones and if they browse to sites using wifi then the same rules would apply.
I think as parents its our duty to protect our kids and its only possible if we keep an eye on them. There's a very fine line between trust and invading their privacy though so we've to be really careful. I bet parenting 20 years ago wasn't as tough as it is now.

I ought to set up the router properly, what you've done sounds interesting. One problem though is I have come across a site before which was innocently called a variation on 'Disney' - that makes it difficult to know where to draw the line.

I walked into my 12 year old room tonight and he minimised his internet - didn't think much of it - then walked in again and he did the same so I challeged him.

He was on facebook chatting to a friend but it gave me an opportunity to tell him that if he hides things from me I will get suspicious

I trust them both and do every now and again check their internet browsing history - not in real detail but just the headlines - It is difficult but like everything you need to be open and hope they can make the right choices

Some internet providers like talktalk will filter conent for you, but even the best of these services aren't perfect. My parents were good because they were open with us kids about what was out there and what was inapproprate. While I was always much more tech savy than my parents, as i'm sure my son will be, i have no doubt that having the computer in the living room helped keep me safe. It also helped that I didn't have regular internet access until I was a teenager which isn't much of an option these days for kids.
Smart phones are also something that shouldn't be over looked.

Smart phones are also something that shouldn't be over looked.

That's great advice, many of my friends set up parental controls or monitor their kids internet usage but forget about their phones - doh :pinch:

Hi David

Somehow overlooked your post originally, so welcome to the forum.

Tell us more about yourself - it sounds as though you could have good advice for those of us who aren't particularly up on this sort of stuff.

Thank you Clive.

I only studied computer programming for two years and that was a decade ago so i'm far from an expert. Some things I do know about the internet that I think every parent should be aware of.
A determined person can always find a way around atempts to block internet content.
Filters like talktalk's are good in the sense that it doesen't matter what they connect with, be it a phone, ipad, or laptop, it will be filtered. This can be worked around though.
Keep in mind that checking browsing history is not enough as browsers have a built in private browsing modes that don't keep a history.
Changing the DNS settings on your router to open dns can also add another layer of protection for the whole home. More onfo on this can be found at http://www.opendns.com/home-solutions/parental-controls/
The key probably lies in making accessing it seem more hassle than it's worth.

Also I just recently survied my first year as a dad so boy am I tired

That's the problem with computers, however much you study, there's always new stuff along so fast that it's impossible to keep up to date, and if there's a way around something, it will spread very quickly around friends etc - ultimately, it's just a matter of doing the best you can and forums such as this give us parents a way of letting others spread information hopefully as quickly. Thanks for the link, I'll take a look at that.