HOW TO PROTECT YOUR CHILD FROM BAD INTERNET?

The Internet is constantly challenging parents. How to drag a child away from gadgets, how to protect from bad sites and find out what he is doing on the network by having full total security - read our material.

Modern children are natives of the digital world. If in the past decade it was possible to make very little effort to restrict the child's access to virtually, now this requires a whole strategy - not only technological, but also psychological.

Protecting Children on the Internet: New Challenges

The Internet of the second decade of the 21st century is no longer just a knowledge bank, a "huge messy library" as it was in the era of Web 1.0. This is a communication platform that everyone uses, including children. In this regard, the modern Internet is not much different from a city street, a park, a shopping center: both there and there people meet, communicate, shop, relax and have fun.

Therefore, the nature of the threats that lie in wait for children on the Internet has fundamentally changed. If earlier these were only information threats - for example, access to information about drugs, sects, pornography, extremist movements - now these are also threats of a behavioral nature: desocialization, gambling addiction, uncontrolled waste of money, virtual bullying, disclosure of personal data, dangerous acquaintances.

And if the previous ten years, the technological community has been actively inventing ways to protect children from sites with unwanted information - how to remove "bad books" from the "library" - now developers and parents have a new challenge: how to correctly introduce a small user into the digital space , monitor and correct his behavior in the virtual world in time.

In this article, we will talk about parental control tools that not only allow you to protect your child from bad sites, but also to shape the correct network behavior.

Access Restriction: Reality First, Then Virtuality

How to protect children from bad sites. There are a lot of parental control tools these days. The first large group is the means that prevent the child from spending a lot of time online. If you keep in mind the analogy with the real world, no one walks all day in the park and spends a day in the cinema - and so, and on the Internet, you also need to "walk" in dosage.

Why it is useful: Forms a moderate attitude towards the use of the Internet, prevents desocialization, gambling addiction.

What can be done: Gradually reveal the possibilities of technology to the child. From a pedagogical point of view, it is much better if your child's first device is not an iPhone or a gaming PC, but gadgets with reduced capabilities:

Children's smart watch: A bright wrist device with GPS, a watch, the ability to call mom and WITHOUT the Internet - an excellent choice for both the baby and parental nerves (read the CHIP guide on choosing a children's smart watch)

Push-button telephone: A modern device "on buttons" with large numbers and a simple camera will suit a preschooler in the same way as his grandmother - but let it not have the Internet yet;

Smartphone or tablet in "kid mode". As the child grows up, he can begin to be introduced into the world of smart gadgets. To do this, you can purchase a device that works in a special mode: it allows the child to play games, download educational applications, watch cartoons, but does not provide access to the "regular" Internet. In addition, it makes it possible to limit the period of use - after its expiration, the device will simply turn off. For example, it can be a tablet like the Samsung Galaxy Tab Kids or a smartphone with the Kids Mode shell installed from the same Samsung.

Laptop or computer with limited rights: This can be configured in Windows at the OS level by creating a restricted account for the child and enabling the Parental Controls option upon creation. Then the child will be able to install and run only those programs that you allow, as well as use the computer for a limited period of time. Another good idea is to give your child Linux :)

Content Filtering: Good First, Everything Else Later

How to protect children on the internet. The second group of modern parental control tools allows you to filter out the very dangerous information. Continuing the analogy with the real world, these are technical means of restricting places to visit: you do not allow your child to go to bars, nightclubs or rallies - there are places on the Internet where children do not need to go.

Why it is useful: It helps to form a system of moral restrictions for life in society, to successfully filter information in the future.

What you can do: Use different types of content filters. There are many of them, and many can work without your intervention. This, for example:

Protection at the state level: Since 2010, Russia has had a law “On the Protection of Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development”, on the basis of which law enforcement agencies have been eradicating websites about drugs, methods of suicide, destructive sects, and extremist organizations for almost 10 years;

Provider-Level Protection: Most ISPs offer a Parental Control option, which allows you to select and block sites that children might not want - for example, pornography - at the provider's DNS servers. If you add this option to your tariff, the provider will take care of protecting your child from bad sites;

Protection at the router level: Many routers have built-in parental controls that allow you to block sites that your child does not need (for example, online game servers if the child spends too much time there). You can also configure routing via DNS so that, for example, Yandex provides a list of unwanted sites

Protection at the level of search engines: Both Google and Yandex are configured for safe search by default, that is, they try to display “decent” resources at the user's request;

Protection at the software level: Parental control functions are built into many antiviruses.

Monitor Your Child's Online Behavior!

How to protect your child from bad internet? None of the tips to help protect your child on the Internet better than the simplest and most important: watch your children. Completing the analogy with reality, you accompany the child to a park, a cinema or a shopping center, ask them to walk under your windows in full view and it cannot be otherwise on the Internet either.

Why it is useful: It allows you to notice disturbing behavior in time, for example, network bullying or participation in dangerous movements, to track what the child is talking about on the Internet and with whom he is texting, to take action in time.

What you can do: Take advantage of technical capabilities for online tracking. For example, the Kid Logger service and application allow you to literally spy on your child's online behavior. Install the application on the child's computer and phone, buy an account on the service and receive detailed reports on everything the child does online: what sites he visits, to whom and what he writes, what he photographs and uploads. Yes, it may not be very ethical. But this is much better than not paying attention to your child's problems.