"Your child could be at danger over the Internet" - by Janani Gopalakrishnan

While the Internet is undoubtedly the greatest boon of our generation, providing you and your children with a limitless source of information, I think it’s necessary that you also know about certain dangers that your children may be prone to online and the precautions you must exercise to make sure that the Internet is a completely enjoyable, safe and educational experience for your children.

An unsupervised child left to browse the Internet is as vulnerable to danger as a child roaming alone in the streets. You never know what kind of obscene and unsuitable sites your child may come across, considering that there are web sites on the Internet covering subjects ranging from virtual puja rooms to science and math lessons to language translators to instructions on how to make a bomb!

If browsing needs supervision, chatting needs even more. Chatting is an excellent communication tool and provides your child the opportunity to interact with other youngsters from all over the World, helping them learn about various cultures etc. Here again, one needs to be very careful as several dangers may take root from the single feature of anonymity. What you see while chatting is only a screen name, which means nothing in terms of identity. The person your child is chatting with may claim to be a 10-year old child, but may in reality be a 50-year old man with perverse notions. You never know, so it’s always better to be careful.

What you need to do to protect your child while browsing and chatting is actually very simple. Here’s what you need to do…

• Do not keep the computer in your child’s room. Instead keep it in the living room or elsewhere where you can keep an eye on your child when he/ she is browsing or chatting.
  
• Spend some quality Internet time with your children, when you browse with them, discuss the sites they usually browse and also introduce them to some good websites like encyclopaedias and other learning resources that are recommended for their age.
  
• Teach your child never to reveal any personal details like name, telephone number, address, age, physical description etc while chatting and not to fill up any registration forms without your guidance.
  
• Instruct your child to come to you for guidance if/when any chat friend asks for their address or photo or such details or extends an invitation for a telephone conversation or a face-to-face meeting. Even if you, after careful analysis, decide to allow a meeting, please make sure it’s in a public spot.
  
• Speak openly with your children, discuss the dangers lurking in the Internet and in a friendly manner suggest that they ignore and not respond to any suggestive, obscene, threatening or overwhelming information they come across in websites or spam mails.
  
• See to it that your children are not carried away by online marketing gimmicks which offer unbelievable discounts etc.
  
• Set time limits for Internet usage by your children. If they are going to spend all their evenings chatting and browsing and playing online games, it’s most likely they are going to lose out on their precious childhood. Nothing can be more valuable that their play time and real life socialising.
  
• Even when your child is browsing through educational sites for completing a class project or assignment make sure they go through the information available online, understand it and then rewrite their homework in their own words. I find a lot of children just print an encyclopaedia article on the required topic and submit it to the teacher without even a glance at the information they’ve downloaded! From the computer to the printer to paper to the teacher’s desk. Shouldn’t the brain have been somewhere on the route map?
  
• Even if your children get all the information they want on the Internet, take them to the library often and inculcate the reading habit. No amount of browsing can equal the sheer joy of reading.
  
• Print out guidelines for browsing and chatting and paste it at a clearly visible location near the computer to keep your child reminded of them. Make sure you word the guidelines in a friendly way, because children are unlikely to follow anything that sounds like an order!
  
• Consider buying some filtering software for restricting the sites your children can access and blocking unwanted sites.
  

Check out websites like the following for more information regarding Internet safety:

Netnanny
Safesurf
Cyberangels
Childnet


So, now you are all equipped to provide your children with a really safe, educational, entertaining and enjoyable Internet experience. Allow them to use the Internet safely and to truly benefit from all its resources
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