3 Basic Tools to Monitor Your Children Online and Keep Their Trust

When your kids are online, what do they do? What sites do they visit? With whom do they communicate? You are probably much better informed than the other parents you know, simply because you are using Norton Online Family to stay informed. For your friends who can’t answer those questions with a degree of certainty, you can let them know they can improve their knowledge and understanding of their children’s online lives without fear of becoming an internet spy. First, let’s review some basic best practices.

Common sense, talk and technology

To make sure that our kids’ online activities are safe, healthy and enriching, we have three tools at our disposal – good old-fashioned parental common sense, frequent talks with our kids, and technology tools that can help control and reveal what our kids are doing online. Let’s take a look at those tools.

Common sense

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, the most basic way to monitor your kids’ online activities is to apply a little common sense. Here are two common sense suggestions –

Put your computer in a public area of your home, not in their bedroom or any room where you won’t be while they’re online. All parents know how to watch their kids “out of the corner of their eye.” Do so when they’re online.

Most tweens now have cell phones of their own. If your children do as well, set boundaries and rules for their safe use. Make sure the phones aren’t in use after “lights out” time. You can monitor the bill to see when texts and calls are made, or you can ask that phones be charged at night in a central location. If you do this from the first day they have a phone, your children will accept it as a condition of this new device.

Limit your kids’ time online. Less time online means less time to bump into or do the wrong thing, or become addicted to online activities. Use the operating system tools or Norton Online Family to help reinforce your family guidelines.

Talk

Have the internet safety Talk with your kids. Set the family internet rules. Let them know what you expect them to do and not do –

• Tell them not to instant message or email with people you and they don’t know.
• Tell them to never give any personal information to anyone you don’t know.
• Let them know what kinds of websites you expect them to avoid.
• Make sure they know that they should tell you if something weird or unexpected happens.
• Ask questions. Ask your kids to show and tell you what they’re doing online –
• What websites they’re visiting
• With whom they’re instant messaging or emailing
• If anything weird has happened to them online, and so on.

Symantec Family Advocate, Marian Merritt, has written an excellent blog titled “Start the Talk” with more detailed suggestions on this same topic. To check out her great ideas and parents’ reactions, click here.

Technology

You already have rudimentary technology tools, namely, your PC operating system and your browser software, to help you manage and monitor your kids’ online activities. In addition parents can use the new and unique family safety service, Norton Online Family, to help you stay in touch with your children’s internet activities and make sure they stay safe while online. Internet security software can also help you manage their activities and help protect them and you against malicious online activity.

Here is a brief overview of the technology at your disposal –

Your Internet browser provides a history log of the websites that have been visited by anyone using your PC. In Microsoft Internet Explorer you can just click on the View History icon, or type Ctrl+Shift+H. You can view that history and click on any of the websites that you don’t recognize and check it out. Be aware: history files can be deleted, and savvy kids may know how to do so.

Your browser also creates temporary files on your PC that can indicate what Web pages have been visited. In Internet Explorer, you can find these temporary files by selecting Internet Options on the Tools menu.

Search engines, such as Google, offer safe search options that enable you to block, for example, explicit sexual content. You can find this feature in Google under Preferences and then Safe Search Filtering. Without a family safety service, these settings can be altered.

Instant messaging and email programs also provide a history of contacts, communications and more importantly downloaded files. If you’re not sure how to locate them, check Help for the application. Make sure you monitor your children’s use of social networks, since many tweens are just starting to join and create their accounts. They then start communicating with their peers almost entirely within those services. You should “friend” your children as a prerequisite of their getting a social networking account but try not to “lurk” on their page. Tell your children that you will check in from time to time and review photos and messages that are public.

Both Windows® and the Mac OS® include basic parental controls that help you manage and monitor kids’ computer and Internet use.

Or, and you can simplify your life by using Norton Online Family, the easy-to-use family safety service from Norton. This will allow you to log into your family account from any computer and see, at a glance, how long your kids are online, where they’ve been, if they’ve broken any House Rules and whether they are talking to people online you don’t know. If you are already using Norton Online Family, let your friends know how your experience has been and help them get started too.

Monitor and manage, but don’t spy

As you may know there is a lot of so-called “parental control” software around that is designed to let you spy on your kids while they’re online. Frankly, we believe, using a service like Norton Online Family which doesn’t even allow “stealth” monitoring is likely to build trust and deepen the parent/child bond with regard to the Internet, instead of pitting parent versus child in some type of internet espionage game.