Children surfing the Internet are always just a few clicks away from information that is harmful to them. Violence and pornography, as well as calls to extremism or a threat during chatting, can appear on screen both solicited and unsolicited. However, there are plenty of options for parents to let their children use the internet without any worries.
01 Start the conversation
Children spend an average of 11 hours a week on the internet. Two-thirds have negative experiences, such as seeing pornography or being threatened while chatting. Less than half of the children share these negative experiences with their parents. As a result, parents cannot help the child process the event and also persist in the idea that active protection is not necessary. However, parents have an important role when their children learn to deal with media. It is therefore more important than any technical aid to discuss with the child what it is doing on the Internet and what happens there. Good tools for these conversations can be found at www.mijnkindonline.nl.
What is normal news to an adult can quickly have more impact on a child.
02 Kid Friendly Browser
For children up to 8 or 9 years old, parents can install a special browser that shields the children from sites with unwanted content. An example of this is the MyBee browser, which can be downloaded for free from www.mybee.nl. MyBee is a product of telecom provider KPN that offers it for free and wants to contribute to a 'better internet for children'. There are now versions for Windows and Mac and the iPad version should appear this summer. Within MyBee, users can be created who, based on age, can visit the websites that are suitable for them. MyBee distinguishes children from 0 to 3 years, 3 to 7 years and 7 to 10 years.
MyBee supports multiple users with their own internet access based on age and rules.
03 Development towards positive content
For children, you should not only look for safe websites, but also for websites that match the level and interests. What is fun for what age? An important aspect of MyBee is that it helps to find suitable websites. MyBee has three types of sites: sites approved by its own parents, sites approved by the editors of MyBee and sites approved by other parents. Per child can be set which category it can visit. Parents who discover a nice site can evaluate it via Website. They provide an age and let you know if the rating can be shared with other parents.
The age and settings chosen by the parents determine which sites a child can visit with the MyBee browser.
04 Technology as a solution
Media education is that part of parental education that contributes to a child learning to deal consciously, pleasantly and safely with media such as television, films, games and the Internet. Media education is about stimulating use, teaching skills to handle media and setting limits on content and duration. All parents are more or less aware of media education. Actually, a child requires watching the internet almost continuously, but that is of course difficult and often undesirable. Parental control software can partly take over that task.
Parental control software is best known for blocking errant websites, but it can do and mean so much more.
05 Lots of offer
The range of parental control programs is very large and very diverse. Nevertheless, there are still products that disappear from the market that apparently do not catch on enough. It is therefore important when choosing a product for parental control that it has preferably already been proven for a number of years. There are plenty of those. Well-known parental control products are the Dutch YourSafetynet (trial version via www.yoursafetynet.com), Windows Live Family Safety from Microsoft (installable via download.live.com), and the English language Net Nanny which is included in various security suites (downloadable). at www.netnanny.com).
Yoursafetynet is a Dutch product for safe internet for children.
