The internet is quickly becoming a dangerous place for children, and any good caring parent would find themselves questioning what their child is doing while they’re browsing the ‘net. Should a parent feel guilty when invading the privacy of their child? YES, invading the privacy of your child is wrong and can hurt your child, online predators are known to use a parent’s wrongdoings to manipulate children.
Investing in good parental control software should be your first priority. Using parental control you can block access to dangerous websites without intruding on your child’s activity. Good parental control software allows you to block individual websites you don’t want your child accessing, and obeys internet site ratings.
With that said, even the most trustworthy wisdom-filled children can find themselves lured in by the internet’s dark side, and so it’s important for parents not to underestimate the risks it poses to the young ones.
To make sure your child is safe, join the same sites they join. Facebook is a popular social networking site, and befriending your child means you will see updates from their Facebook. It’ll allow you to keep an eye on them while not peering in too far. Children typically like to boast to their friends, if something is going on you’ll likely hear about it on a social networking site such as this.
Thirdly, sometimes more intrusive action is called for. Hacking in to your child’s computer is a risky operation when it comes to their trust, it’s almost like breaking into someone’s personal diary or journal – however, you are their parent, not their best friend, so swallow the guilt and hack away. The very first thing you’ll want to do is switch off your internet connection – you don’t want the messengers connecting and showing his or her friends that they’ve logged on when, in fact, they haven’t. So switch your router off, and then continue.
Log in to the computer (here’s hoping you know the password!), and look on the start menu. The most frequently accessed programs will be displayed, what are they? If a game they shouldn’t be playing is on that list, you’ll need to have words.
Next, load the internet browser. For Internet Explorer, click the Star in the top left corner and then click History, browse through this and you’ll be able to see which websites they’ve been visiting. Are there websites listed that they shouldn’t be visiting? Bear in mind that some of the sites may have popped up without the child knowing, so if you’re going to bring anything up with your child you should probably make sure there are many sites. Click the site to open it up and see how many pages were viewed, if there were lots of pages viewed, it’s fair to assume they were browsing it.
Click Start and go to Recent Documents or Recent Items, and look to see what’s in here. Look over the file names for anything you’d consider suspicious, and if something catches your eye then open it.
Whether or not you want to go through their documents and conversations is your decision, my personal opinion is that you should only do this to satisfy suspicion. If you haven’t found anything above, you’d be best to not cross that line.
Good luck, here’s to hoping the children have been good!