The children of today are heavily exposed to the internet and are vulnerable to slip into the dark side of the web. It is natural for parents to take precautionary and preventive measures to ensure that their child has a safe and secure web-experience. With so much information and content overflowing and bombarding your child, it is necessary for parents to limit and control their kid’s access to the internet.
Safeguarding the interests of your child while surfing online is the need of the hour and this is a detailed and comprehensive plan of actions. The parents must compulsorily adhere to such measures if they do not want their children to fall prey to scams, cyber bullying, online predators in the world wide web.
Measures to Ensure Online Safety
Talk to your child
Educate children about cybercrimes and offences. When your child intends to spend time on the internet in order to complete an assignment or research on a topic, the parents are duty bound to give their child a heads up about the online world. Parents must explain to their children about the dangers and mishaps of browsing online. This must be done in a simple, child-friendly language. The young internet users must be taught on how to identify such online predators and shams such as Cyberbullying, Phishing, falling for shams and much more.
Limit the time of usage
Another way to secure the internet usage of your child is to set a cap on the usage limit the time a child spends on the internet. Children perceive the internet as a fascinating world. Therefore, this leads to children using the internet for longer hours, thereby increasing the probability of exposure of any untoward online offences. Hence, clarifying what their child can and cannot do while navigating the web, and setting usage limits goes a long way in reducing the chances of your child facing unfortunate consequences.
Install parental controls softwares
The internet is an advanced medium. In order to protect their children from the internet, parents must install Parental Control Softwares such as Qustodio, OpenDNS Family Shield, Kidlogger on their devices before their kids get their hands on them. These software monitors children’s activities on the net and it also blocks any malicious sites or unusual web pages that are reported as scams.
Install antivirus softwares
Installing antivirus solutions on any devices that children use are also a significantly useful method while securing your young ones on the internet. This ensures that nothing is downloaded without permission and that no information is accessed without prior permissions.
Ensure a Secured WiFi Network is Connected
Another extremely important measure to work on is to secure one’s WiFi network. WiFi networks of your home is also a portal for malicious users to have unauthorised access. To secure your wireless internet
networks, parents can set a strong password so no one authorised devices are connected. Children must also be warned against connecting their devices to unsecure WiFi networks outside their homes. Connecting to a WiFi network that doesn’t ask for a password may seem attractive to children, however, this is also a loophole for hackers to sneak into your devices and exploit your privacy.
Although there are various measures of securing and protecting the online usage of your children, it all boils down to raising awareness amongst the student community. Parents are accountable for the actions of their children while browsing and therefore, it is the duty of responsible parents to sensitize their children about the risks of the world wide web.
