Keeping Your Kids Safe Online – 6 Things You Could Do

Being online nowadays seems to be one of the things that children just can’t seem to do without, and the excuse is always along the lines of staying in touch with friends, or playing their favourite games. Inasmuch as the Internet can be useful to kids as a source of information, entertainment and communication, there are still very many dangers that young children continue to face whenever they’re online. These dangers range from viruses that may infect their computers as a result of accessing malicious websites, to adult material that may come up unexpectedly as one of the search results. As a parent or guardian, you certainly don’t want your children to access that kind of material on the Internet.

Keeping Your Kids Safe Online – 6 Things You Could Do

How to Keep Your Kids Safe Online

To help you ensure your kids stay safe online, we’ve lined up about 6 tips you could implement, that should help you rest easy knowing that your children are safe whenever they’ll be accessing the Internet.

1. Get A VPN

Using a VPN is probably one of the best tips you’ll get from this list since doing so means your child is virtually untraceable when online. This is a great security measure since it allows for your child to remain untraceable, meaning none of their private information can get illegally obtained. Aside from being anonymous, your child’s connection will also be encrypted, so you won’t have to worry about anyone trying to hack through their devices.

With the many VPN services in the market, choosing one provider might tend to be a little more difficult than you would’ve hoped. If you find yourself in such a situation, and you need to have a solution that won’t let you down, we’d recommend ExpressVPN. Their 256-bit encryption, 1000 servers in more than 90 countries, and strict no-logging policy make them one of the most reliable services available & with their 30-day money back guarantee, you should be able to test out their service before you buy into a subscription.

2. Monitor Their Social Media

Social media takes up a lot of the time that youngsters spend online as they’re always keen about trying out new things, and connecting with their friends in different ways. It therefore becomes difficult to keep up on all the platforms that your child might be on, and also identify the kind of risks that they face on such platforms. One method you can apply to make sure your child stays safe whenever online is to take time and talk to them about best practice whenever they’re socializing with strangers on the Internet.

You also need to remind them about how important it is to not give out their private information to anyone they don’t know, and also not to direct any harsh comments to a company or other people that they’re not familiar with. As a guardian, you could also go ahead and create your own account and whatever platforms your child happens to be in just to keep an eye on their activities.

3. Switch Websites To Restricted Mode

To make websites child friendly, you should try whenever you can to switch them into a kids mode so that your kids don’t get to access inappropriate content when surfing the web. A site like YouTube is able to filter out videos containing adult content when switched to restricted mode. You could also do the same on Google by turning SafeSearch on. This way you’ll exclude anything related to pornography in the search results. If you still think that the filtering done through Google’s safe search option isn’t up to par, then you could go ahead and introduce them to a child-friendly search site like KidRex.org.

4. Get Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware Software

Kids might not really know about the kind of links that could lead them to bad software such as malware or viruses. They might end up clicking on them without the slightest hint that they could be clickbait. Unlike them, adults who spend a lot of their time working on computers are easily able to identify such links and avoid them, so to protect the young ones from doing so, we might need to install software that helps protect their devices from the harmful effects that may come about. You can do this through installing antivirus or anti-malware software on any of the machines that your young ones use.

5. Setup Accounts With Limited Access

A large number of the software systems in the market today allow for users to set up accounts that have a lot of limited accessibility and restrictions, and in doing so, they provide the best kind of accounts for use by children. Windows users, for example, are able to set up accounts for their children that don’t have any administrative access. The same applies for Android and iOS phone users.  

6. Talk To Them

One of the best ways to get your children to understand the kind of risks that exist online is to talk to them. Educate them on the kind of bad things that exist online, and how to stay away from them. Let them know what they need to look at to tell how trustworthy a site is, and also set an example through how you yourself use the Internet either for research, or for entertainment. Stress on the importance of signing out accounts when using public computers, and also make sure you also enhance your knowledge on how best to maintain a high level of security whenever you’re online.

Keeping Your Kids Safe Online – Conclusion

The many risks that exist online may make you feel as though the Internet isn’t really a safe place for your children. Dangers such as cyber bullying, viruses and hackers may make you inclined to keeping your children off the net, but it being one of the largest sources of information, we can’t deny the role that the Internet plays in education. If you get to implement the six tips we’ve outlined in this help guide, then you won’t really have that much to worry about regarding the safety of your kids online. If there are a few more tips you think we might’ve left out, share them with us through the comment section below.