by Amaryllis Holloway-Turman

Created on: April 20, 2009

Some people think that monitoring their child's time on the internet is not important. They have given their children guidelines. They have told their children what they should and should not do online. They have put in place mediocre controls and assume that nothing will bad happen. A parent needs to know what their child is looking at and doing when they are online. There is more than one method of monitoring a child's internet usuage.

Some parents have set up the parental internet controls in the internet browser as their main measure of control. The child would have their own user name and the parent would control the access for the child. For example, if a child tried to access a webpage that was inappropriate, the access would be blocked. If the child had designated hours to access the internet, this could be controlled also. This method is probably best for a child under the age 6. Older children are craftier. Chances are that your children know a lot more about the computer than you do. In that case, they will have the advantage and try to use that to remove the controls that you put in place. For example, many parents use a password to protect the changes they have made to the internet controls. And it is not surprising that their children have cracked the password to relax the internet monitoring options.

If the computer is in the family room, you are able to monitor when your child is surfing the internet, how much time spent online, and the content of the searches. If your child is old enough to go into chat rooms, ask your child to show you who his/her friends are. You should know who your child's friends are. Their friends should be people you know in person and not people that they met on the internet only.

If you are concerned that your child might be doing some things that he or she should not, check the cookies and temporary Internet files folder to know what websites your child is visiting. You can also check the web history to see the list of recently visited websites. If your child is savvy enough to erase the browser history, you might need to install more advanced programs that monitor internet usage so that they cannot erase their tracks so easily.

The Internet should be viewed as a tool. It can be very beneficial or it can be detrimental. It is a great educational tool because any information that you wish to find about any given topic can be found. However, there are also sick, perverted, malicious people in the world that would seek to prey on the innocent, naive children who are online. By teaching your child what how to use the Internet and by monitoring your child's internet usage, you can help to prevent problems that could possibly occur from the misuse of the internet.

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