Fun and Safe Child’s Web Surfing

I believe that as a parent, we are concerned about web surfing safety for our kids. It may seem difficult and added on that if parents are both working, however, with some clear responsibilities and appropriate boundaries being set, we should be able to make our kids online safe, fun and family friendly as well.

Basically there are no hard and fast rules on this, and the keywords here are try to get ourselves involved as much as possible and be prepared to guide them. Throw away the thinking of just giving out rules and requirement, as it hardly work or be that effective anymore.

Involvement here means knowing what your kids are doing online, who are they talk to, do they give away personal information to third party, do your kids surf net and use computer on a regular basis, is the computer being placed in an open space at home for parent monitoring, and many others under different environment that you could think of.

Guiding could take the form of guiding your kids to safe sites, teach them to search safely, tell them the boundaries of where they should search, and help them evaluate the sources, etc.

What was mentioned above is basically quite general but was overlooked by most parents.

In addition to the above, you may feel a necessity to install internet filters for help. What internet filters can help in this respect are:

1. Filter objectable contents
2. Block any kind of unsolicited web sites
3. Monitoring your kids running applications
4. Records of visited web sites
5. Instant messaging control
6. Set time limit on visiting all or certain web sites

plus many others features.

Do not worries, the installation and configuration for internet filters is quite simple. I have appended below some free download which you can use, just click on the link and you will be directed accordingly:

1. http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,57719-page,1-c,education/description.html


2. http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,58233-page,1-c,internettools/description.html


3. http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,65182-page,1-c,security/description.html

OK, I believe you would ask me what are the best kids’ web sites out there, right? Here are a few that I came across which you might be interested:

1. BBC History for kids (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/forkids/index.shtml - a lot of good stuff there, and is perfect for kids interested in history, for school project, games plus lots of great info.


2. PBS (http://www.pbskids.org/) – a web site filled with lots of videos, activities, coloring pages, and many more.


3. Animal Planet (http://www.animal.discovery.com/) – if your kids love animal, sure they will like to visit this site as it contains fascinating animal videos and they can get behind the scenes of their favorite Animal Planet/Discovery Channel shows.


4. StoryNory (http://www.storynory.com/) – do your kids love stories read to them? Of course they do! This site is full of free, downloadable, iPod-ready stories for kids, you could probably make them listen to before sleep time.


5. Jab Brett’s Activities Pages (www.janbrett.com/activities_pages.htm) - a site with a treasure trove of coloring pages, flash cards, free books, and printables of all kinds. For your info, Jan is a celebrated children’s book author and illustrator.


6. Neopets (http://www.neopets.com/) – one of the largest virtual pet site on the web. If your kids longing for pet, but due to whatever reasons just can’t get it, then this is the site for the fun of a pet without a mess!


7. Sports for kids (http://www.sikids.com/) – a great site for kids to learn about their favorite sports.

I hope you enjoy reading this and do let me know if there is anything that is good to be added here.