Protect Your Child Online

Right from the moment when our little bundles of joy came to our lives their needs and safety have become our top priorities as parents. We carefully choose the right toys for them. We hold their hands tightly as we walk along and as we cross the street. As we tuck them to bed at night we see to it that no immediate danger is around. Even as we go about doing our chores it’s hard to take our eyes off them for fear that their fragile being would just suddenly break. Almost on autopilot, our initial reaction whenever our little ones pick something up is “No, honey! Don’t touch that!”

Unfortunately, the same can’t be done when it comes to censoring our children’s online activities. As children grow up, they inevitably become aware of the enormous amounts of information they could explore online. With all the billions of sites out there, the effort to police our children’s online activities is almost futile and there’s no way of telling which site our children often visit that poses great threat. Very recently, it has been reported that there has been an alarming four-fold increase in serious child abuse on the web. Not a paltry increase to ignore.

Ironically, the virtual dangers of the Internet are not entirely virtual. Online pages such as those that have pornographic themes, encourage people to participate in illegal activities and sites that sneakily solicits personal information such as SSN, credit card number or bank account information with the intention of stealing away one’s identity, while virtual, when accessed without caution could potentially result to serious and real repercussions that would cost us our livelihood, even worse, our children’s safety. To date the quest to construct a really sophisticated software to help curb online abuses of children and other illegal activities is still, well, a quest. That is why researchers suggest that a “clean-slate” approach to restructuring the Internet for the future for better online security is the ultimate solution. In fact, research and development for the “new Internet” is underway. This shows that the workaround for online security is no longer useful that they had to restructure the Internet from scratch.

Let us support whatever efforts there are out there to try to resolve these alarming issues involving our children’s safety online. But as parents, education is key to making our children aware of the potential dangers that are sitting, waiting for them online. Start right now. Teach your children the proper ways of using the Internet and don’t hold back when making them aware of the dangers inappropriate web pages bring. Let’s make it a vital part of our responsibilities as parents.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Protecting Your Child Online . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.