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Monitoring a teen's internet use is much more important than monitoring your six year old's. Teens use the internet as an escape, creating fantasy versions of themselves, and as an online journal to reveal their deepest thoughts and fears. Sites like Myspace and Facebook have given teens a whole new type of online forum where they can display personal photos, information about their school, friends and hobbies. Any good parent stresses with his child not to talk to strangers, and yet by not monitoring his online activity, you have no idea to whom he may be talking or what identifying information he may be sharing. Teens are much more trusting than adults, and believe that the person typing on the other end is who he says is. All this makes them much more susceptible to online predators.

Another concern in teen internet use is what they may be viewing. Many parents use parental controls as a means of monitoring, and believe that this will prevent their teen from accessing violent or pornographic sites. Wrong! In many cases what gets blocked is the site your teen needs to access to write a paper for school, while allowing pornographic images right through its filter. And here's a tip for parents who do use parental controls: search engines like Google are not blocked, and neither are image searches on these engines. Regardless of what sort of parental controls you may have in place, your teen can very easily perform an image search with keywords you don't want him repeating.

Parents should be vigilant in their monitoring, and ignore admonitions by those who tout it as an invasion of privacy. The best method is to have the computer located in a general living area of the home, not tucked away in your teen's room. If it is in his room, check in on him periodically, even if it's under the guise of asking him if he knows where the scissors disappeared to. Make sure your search engine is set to maintain a history of the recent searches, and check it periodically. Check the cookies and temporary internet files on your computer. Look at your teen's address book and friends on pages like Myspace and Facebook. Be nosy! Your teen's safety depends upon it.

Learn more about this author, Nichole Nash.
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