At this age, you really cannot keep the internet or the gadgets out of your children’s hands, can you? Be it for the school assignment or their own personal research. Your children are bound to come home and request your laptop or tablet to surf the net. And then, you will have to accept the benefits the internet has both in their education and giving them a social life but online menaces like identity theft, phishing, cyberbullying also come to haunt your dreams. So, teaching cyber safety rules to your children is a primary responsibility that you will have to undertake soon, and here are 5 ways in which you can do that.
In this article:
1. Install a proper antivirus on the computer
Buy a top antivirus with the best internet protection features and install it into the system that your children use. It will not only keep the malware away, which tends to steal data of the computer, but you can also exercise parental lock, safe search, and many more similar protective measures. This is step 1 in keeping your kids safe online as understandably; you will not be able to maintain constant supervision.
2. Talk to your child about the possible threats
Safety cannot come without awareness as your kids will never learn to stay away from strangers without knowing what harm can possibly come to them. Take your time to teach your children about the mistakes that kids of their age tend to make while surfing and talk about internet safety tips for students. Once they understand the consequences, their probability of refraining from such acts will increase automatically.
3. Make sure your child surfs in your presence
Not that you should be staring at the screen to enforce internet safety for children while they are using their gadgets to connect, but make sure you are in their proximity when they go online. Set your Wi-Fi passwords to auto-forget after the computers are turned off and ensure that your kids sit in an open area like the living room while using the net. When they know that there is a chance that you might catch a glance at their screen, they will refrain from any mischief.
4. Teach them about internet privacy
It is really an open world out there. Things are easier to steal online. As a general rule of internet safety tips for parents to teach their children, help them to connect the online world with the real world. Ask them questions like, will you share your home address or phone number with any random person on the streets? Will you tell them your game’s password? So, if you will not do it in the real world, do not do it online as well.
5. Keep yourself updated about the latest threats
You can never correctly answer the question of how do I keep my children safe online if you yourself do not know about the evolution of the dark side of the internet. Threats can come in any form, but you can only predict it if you know how to identify it. Knowledge will be your superpower here, as technology is currently growing at an unprecedented rate along with the demons that it brings along.
