Teach Our Kids To Be Safe Cyber Citizens

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Parents often feel they are loosing touch with technology and their kids will always know more than they do when it comes to the internet.

Parents can feel more comfortable if they take a step back and look at the internet technology from a single view. It does not matter what the new service is, the behavior should always be the same. We need to teach our children to be SAFE CYBER CITIZENS.

It was only in the last 10 years that Chat Rooms were popular, and the norm. We then progressed to Instant Messenger programs such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger.

Social networking sites were next, and have only been around for 5 years. Yes, we here about Facebook almost weekly. Facebook is one of many hundreds of social networking sites in existence.

There have also been some dangerous sites popping up such as ChatRoulette , an anonymous webcam chat site, and formspring.me , an anonymous site where users ask questions of each other.

There are always going to be new sites popping up that may be more dangerous than the other. However, the behavior we want our kids to portray is one of responsibility. We do need to teach our kids about them, but also teach them the consequences of negative action.

When you teach your children about privacy and the importance of thinking carefully before posting anything to the internet; when they understand that anything posted to the internet lasts forever; when they understand the consequences of bullying; when they understand that real friends are only those around them and not just on the internet, we make good progress in equipping our children to be SAFE Cyber Citizens.

How To Manage Your Kids on Facebook

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Given that the popularity of Bebo is on the downward trend, and that in a few years it may be gone forever, Facebook is ever more popular.

Unfortunately, this popularity is resulting in younger members. A user should be 13 years of age at least, to create a Facebook account. Yet children are getting around this by manipulating their birthdate, to make out they are older than what they actually are. We are seeing children as young as 10 now on Facebook!

This is of concern, and it is important for parents to monitor their children's Facebook activity. Here are some tips I recommend:

- if you are not on Facebook, get your kids to help you create a profile

- ask your kids to help you setup / go through your privacy settings with you. That way, you are empowering your kids to educate you, while you are able to see how much they know about the privacy settings.

- once you have gone through the privacy settings, suggest you go through their privacy settings with them.

- ensure your kids privacy settings are well locked down.

- teach your kids the importance of NOT accepting anyone as friends. They should only accept people they know as friends. Otherwise, these strangers have access to all the personal information on your child's profile, including access to their friends. There is a growing trend where children try and 'outdo' their mates, when it comes to the number of friends they have on their profile.

- ensure the 'allow tagged photos' setting is unticked. Otherwise, anyone can upload a photo to their profile, and tag that photo with someone elses name. That photo then appears on that persons profile as well.

- make sure YOU are a friend of your child's profile. that way you can keep an eye on posts and friends attached to their profile.

- encourage your kids to 'unfriend' anyone attached to their profile who they do not know. This is done by clicking on that person's profile, and selecting the 'unfriend' link toward the bottom left of that profile.

Social networking sites are here to stay, and Facebook is constantly evolving. It has become the standard in the western world. As parents, we need to understand how it works, and how best we can monitor our children's activity on such sites.