People that are in their thirties have lived some part of their life without Internet, so most of them are aware of what goes on in the real world, and how devious people can be. However, the teens that have been handed the digital gadgets at an early age have pretty much lived their whole life on the web. They see the world through the eyes of the Internet. While some parents are unaware of the dangers that lurk on the internet and let their children loose on it, many have realized the risk of allowing kids roam the cyberspace unsupervised. Due to the lack of knowledge or tools that can help them in this regard, they end up feeling helpless. Fortunately, the woes of such parents have been heard and answered as the digital marketplace has begun to fill up with nifty parental controls over the last few years. The arrival of such tools has surely addressed many of the fears that parents were living with. The question that now arises is whether you are doing enough as a parent to protect your teens online.
Blocking Content
Kids by nature are curious, especially during their teen years. They are constantly searching for new areas to explore, and often land themselves in inappropriate territory. The activity that teens are most likely to get involved in is pornography. This problem is a pandemic, but fortunately, internet filtering tools like ShieldMyTeen serve as reliable solutions to this growing problem. They do this by letting you block certain keywords from the search and consequently create a risk-free environment to set your teen free in. For example, you can remove words like porn, alcohol, drugs, crime, etc. and this will enable safe search, allowing your kids to surf the web without viewing the blocked content. Do you have such a measure in place, or are you ignoring the threat?
Monitoring Apps
There are all sorts of people on the internet, and the probability of your children bumping into the wrong ones is pretty high. These people are ruthless and hunt for complacent kids so that they can get them involved in some illegal activity or force them to do some drugs. Kids often end up getting caught in the trap laid out for them, thus setting off a chain of events that are nothing short of a nightmare. Fortunately, monitoring apps can mitigate this risk to a large extent. With such a tool on your teens' mobile devices, you can easily learn if they're venturing into high-risk areas on the web, and if they're being hunted by a predator or cyberbully. You are surely shielding your teen in the perilous online environment, aren't you?
Communicate
It is understandable that you as a parent might not know a lot about the internet and how teens are managing to get themselves into trouble on it, but you have to learn its basics and see how things work. Once you understand most of how internet works, you will be able to communicate about its problems with your kids rather easily. This is very important because kids listen to what their parents have to say and are more than likely to apply what is being said. Communication is best solution to this problem, but to properly make them understand the internet concerns, you first have to learn about them yourself. You need to ask yourself if you're giving ample time to your digital education.
