[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 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.