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Keeping your kids safe online? Follow these 5 tips

It’s a nightmare come true – your (grand)children are sitting at the dinner table or lying around in the
living room, vulnerable to unknown threats. Your mind spins as you wonder, what in the world are
my children looking at? Are they downloading explicit content, or planning to meet with sexual
predators?

And most importantly: isn’t our home the one place my kids should be safe?

What you don’t know can hurt your child

Your children are glued to the screen at all kinds of odd hours, and you’re completely unsure of
what they’re up to. It can drive you crazy just trying to imagine what’s reaching them through that
blue light.

It’s hard to understand why young people are so
completely obsessed with the Internet – but for
them it’s much more than a useful tool. It’s where
they socialize, learn, play, and express themselves.
For many of these digital natives, the Internet is
where a large portion of their lives will play out.

While it’s important to give children the space to
grow and explore, it’s also important to cultivate
awareness of the following threats to their safety:

Malware and privacy threats

Kids and teens love torrenting and file sharing, and often their peers will tell them about all the latest
games, movies, and music that they just must have. Kids might know how to acquire all of this
media, but they also might be downloading malware along with it.

This kind of behavior can also get them heavily monitored by companies that are likely working on
behalf of copyright enforcers. While they might not care about their privacy now, a bad choice now
could be something that haunts them in the years to come.

Video game addiction

If your children are gamers, you’re probably used to strange shouting and compulsive clicking
coming from their rooms. It may be hard to believe, but those silly online games could actually rule
your children’s life – people have even died from their inability to put the controller down.

Video game addiction is a real and serious problem. Like addictions to drugs and alcohol, video
game addiction can get in the way of a person’s ability to live a normal and meaningful life. It can
lead to obesity, hallucinations, irritability, and depression. It may seem like your kids’ preference
for video games over socializing and school is not so out of the ordinary, but if your children are
spending upwards of five hours a day gaming, it can negatively affect them on much deeper levels.

16 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – October 2015 Edition
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