How safe are your children online?

I was reading a report this morning on the rising dangers of children online and how little some parents can do to monitor this usage. Being a father of three I find this quite alarming that people are really that naive as to what dangers their children may face on the internet. There are the obvious dangers of chatrooms and online messaging where they can end up talking to strangers who may have very dubious intentions in mind. Is it a case of out of sight out of mind? Would you allow your child to go off somewhere at night and not know where they are going?

I know it's going to make me sound out but 'back in our day' we never had this freedom and access to a much wider audience as children have now so were never exposed to the same types of dangers. If parents don't think there is any risk then they either don't care what their children see or are incredibly short-sighted. The things that are available to see and can influence a young mind are boggling. Anything is there to be found, even things that we wouldn't be able to comprehend being availble IS. I've been an internet user now for over 15 years and still things crop up that amaze even me. I would never let my children stumble across them and make sure the software and monitoring is in place to keep an eye on what they do.

I think that there should be some sort of training covering this introduced in to schools too. My daughter recently came home and told me that they were being given 'social responsibility' lessons in their school which taught them how people in a civilised society live together. Why not add the 'netiquette' in to that too? How children or younger people behave in society is a much larger issue and not one I'm going in to here but if they have things from the internet are influencing them to behave in this way then surely something needs to be done about it?

Another report about this is here

Mark

Comments

[JamesH]

Thanks for this useful post Mark. My eldest daughter is now venturing into the world of mobile phones, the web and online messaging. Having worked in the web business since it's inception I believe I have a fair idea of the dangers but know that is not true of many and I do have concerns how naive parents of even my generation are regarding these issues.

[Linda Tanner]

I have just read your comments on children's safety and you have a good point about teaching children in school about how to behave on-line. I work in a secondary school and would love to see our children have some form of social and safety training by someone who know what they are talking about. There is an awful lot of bullying going on on line through chat sites, my space ect. and e mail. Its about time we were proactive not reactive.