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Chat Rooms and Kids-Do They Go Together?

© Cheryl Lewis

Well after a great deal of contemplating and thinking and wondering you have finally decided to let your kids on the information super highway known as the World Wide Web. You've shown them the basics of the email system they are using in their ISP server. Or if you are like me you've shown them about four or five different mail serving systems and you're still contemplating which one is the best. If this is your situation I recommend that you allow them use of all the email servers to see which one they like the best. Both of my kids who are online use their AOL addresses for email but one of them prefers IE5.5 with our DSL because it moves so much faster for surfing the net. You never can tell what they are going to feel comfortable with.

That is the key to using the internet. What? What's the key you ask? It's comfort. You know being comfortable can make all the difference in anyone's use of the internet. For example, I know someone who really never understood my love of the internet and what I could possibly be so interested in. Now that person has gotten online and found different sites to read and different places to go on the net and they seem to be enjoying it. So making sure that your kids are comfortable online is an important factor. While I have one child who simply won't use anything but AOL the other one uses the latest Internet Explorer. It's what they are comfortable with. It's grasping the technology and harnessing it to learn.

One of the things about AOL that I really do like is the fact that they offer so much for kids. Not only do they offer the parental controls, they offer kids channels and kids chats. Let's face it, anyone who has been in an adult oriented chat room most likely doesn't want their kids there. I know that was one of the things I stressed with my kids. I simply made it clear that chat rooms must be kid oriented in order for them to participate.

There are several sites that offer kids chats too. However, I strongly caution parents to check them thoroughly before allowing your kids to participate. Going into the chat just once isn't enough. You may end up with a younger group of kids on one night and an older group the next. I have serious reservations about letting my kids hang out with high school kids in real life. Not that high school kids are bad but they are older and more exposed. It stands to reason that it's the same principle for the chat rooms.

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