Home » Partners & Parents » Websites for Kids » Protecting kids from the big bad Internet

Protecting kids from the big bad Internet

© Wayne Dawe

(Note: The Internet is a dynamic place and web sites can come and go quite quickly. This is one of my older and some of the links may not work anymore. If you find that this is the case I invite you to look at some of my more recent articles. My links section has my favorite links from past articles and is checked regularly for non working links. Wayne)

Just a few days ago my five year old came up from the basement where both his room and the computer is located and asked my wife to spell calm. She spelled it out for him and then he disappeared back downstairs. A while later he came back and asked her again. She was a bit confused and asked him why so they both headed off downstairs where she found the address bar of the browser filled out with www.jason. Luckily for us www.jason.com is a benign computer consulting firm.

I have a confession to make, even though I keep saying that parents should supervise their kids browsing I have been remiss myself. Ever since I started evaluating Internet Explorer 4.0 I left the Explorer icon and the channel bar (Microsoft's version of push content) on the kids desktop. By clicking on the desktop icon they can go immediately to www.disney.com or www.nationalgeographic.com. Both of these are perfectly kid appropriate sites but where else could they get?

In my travels I have run across three products that are designed to monitor and control you kids computer access. Surfwatch, NetNanny, and CyberSitter all purport to monitor and block your kids access to sites, newsgroups and chat areas on their exclusion list. All the products have a long list of options and features that you can check out yourself at their sites. Another system is the self rating system operated by theRecreational Software Advisory Council. RSAC asks sites to self rate and then blocks access based on their rating. I like the RSAC system because it has rating for nudity, sexual content, violence and allows parents to selectively block access to sites based on their rating level. It also blocks site access for unrated sites if that's what you want. Another advantage is that it's free and doesn't rely on a third party to add "bad sites" to an exclusion list. The disadvantage is that it doesn't control access to Usenet news and IRC. If you don't know why you want to block access to these you should find out.

Another simple way to control smaller children (like 5 year olds) is to turn off the address bar on your browser so kids can't just start typing

The copyright of the article Protecting kids from the big bad Internet in Websites for Kids is owned by Wayne Dawe. Permission to republish Protecting kids from the big bad Internet in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.