Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Safe internet use?

One of our favorite tools when DD was slightly younger (and determined to use the computer in ways that were slightly outside the lines of our household's AUP)--

K9.

Best. thing. ever.

There is a whole ecosystem of online threats, so how you counter them depends on which ones you're worried about.

- Malware: Apart from virus protection, DD also surfs under a user account that lacks admin privileges (so she can't accidentally install malware), and in Firefox with the NoScript plugin (which prevents a lot of those accidental malware installations from ever beginning or ever showing her a pop-up to begin installation).

- Privacy: I helped DD set up an email address using fake identifying information that she can use to register to websites, and we had a number of conversations over the value of anonymity during the process and since setting it up. At this stage DD9 is a consumer of the internet only, so she's not having interactions in which she might be tempted to share personal information. Nevertheless, we've already educated her on the dangers, so we've gotten in front of that problem.

- Age-inappropriate content: Google safe search is turned on, and otherwise, I haven't seen much of a need. DD9 loves to surf Youtube, but the most objectionable material is only accessible when you log in and identify yourself as over 18. Easy enough to bypass, but at this stage, DD9 has no motivation. This is a threat I'm not worried about.

This also more than a few times happened at our kids' first elementary school. I've also seen inappropriate websites pop up a few times based on the phrases in a search rather than misspellings.

The largest challenge for us at home hasn't been those obvious adult websites or obviously inappropriate places etc. The challenge has been how to keep our kids on track when surfing and not wandering off into areas that they really need to have introduced to them by a living breathing human adult, not by watching a video etc online.

Please know I'm about as far from being prudish or conservative as a person can get - that's not what I'm talking about. The biggest one here recently has been videos posted to youtube by other children - of themselves. Not nude pics or anything remotely "bad" - but vlogs of kids who have been injured in sports accidents - my youngest dd is heavily into sports, so she loves to surf youtube to watch other kids doing sports that she practices. That's actually a good way to use the internet - she can watch technique etc. BUT - by googling "x activity sport x" she found not only those videos, but a lot of links on the side of the screen that go to videos where tweens and teens video themselves and talk in detail about how they were injured during that activity, about surgeries, etc. Again, the videos weren't in any way graphic or scary in an out-there kind of way, but they were scary in a much more subtle way to a kid who is very into her sport and she started worrying about being injured (and also wanted to spend time watching more and more of these videos).

Another example of an issue we've had is with our older dd (middle school) who has a wide range of school topics to research, and with her free-er reaching searches finds topics she is very interested in that are very complex - war, discrimination, etc. All good things for her to learn about, and she is a kid who asks *tons* of questions - which is all good! But if another of my children who didn't ask a ton of questions was landing in the same spots and reading the same things, I'd want to know about it so I could insert some discussion. Opening the internet to do research is very different than opening an encyclopedia back in the days when I was a teen.

My last example is just a silly thing but something that happened when we weren't looking (because we didn't think we needed to be lol). We have email accounts for each of our kids and request that we (parents) know their passwords so we can check how they are using their email. It's really been fine, no content or stranger email issues or anything. We'd used a widely-used provider to create the accounts... but we technically stretched the truth by saying our kids were 13 (or whatever age they needed to be to sign up). We neglected to mention that to our kids, although we've had lots of talks about how sites like FB etc require users to be 13 and there are kids (including friends of theirs) who still are able to create the accounts etc etc. We've also talked ad nauseum about how you never share personal info online. (Which brings in yet another point - don't count on all your kids taking everything you say seriously or actually doing what you tell them to do 100% of the time... but I digress)... anyway our older dd was having fun with all the personalization you can do on your email account with avatars, background etc, and also was really into the "social circles" things where you have friends in your circle etc - all of which was ok - until - she included her sister and updated her sister's info including her sister's real birthdate. Which meant her sister's email account got locked... which meant all the precious emails her sister had from her cousins and aunts were now not accessible which meant her sister was beyond upset... so then dad gets involved (which you would think is a good thing, right?) and being the good dad he is he found a way to unlock the account (in theory) but in order to do so he had to vouch for being responsible for his child's account *and* enter credit card info which he was beyond loathe to do... but did anyway... with the promise from this very large widely recognizable middle-of-the-road company with the promise that would unlock the account.. and it never did happen.

So anyway, that's been our experience - the things that will be of concern usually aren't the things you would have predicted! We have always and continue to request that our kids work on the computers in the open rooms in our house where adults are present and where everyone can see everyone's screens.

Last thing I'll mention - I'd been to internet safety talks by our police department several years ago and found them really helpful. I went to another this spring thinking I'd already have a good idea of what was going to be said and it was 200% different because things had changed that quickly. I can't even begin to relate here all the info that was passed on, so my suggestion is if the police department in your area offers a similar type of talk - GO.

Best wishes,

polarbear

While I haven't seen a reliable source on this, a lot of people now say average age of first porn exposure is 10 or 11. So, I wouldn't presume we're all safe from it all till the teen years. Not that I've figured out how to handle this issue, other than using SafeSearch and not allowing solo YouTube wanderings.

I can see why you might be concerned about solo YouTube wanderings. As a parent of a teenage boy (15) I'm not that worried about porn. It's more adults who model behavior I don't want him to learn, specifically trash talking women. And this kind of thing is very hard to tell when it's the audio in you-tube video about a computer game unless you pre-watch every last video they see. Filter's don't really work for this. This is why at this age, we mostly talk about what we expect and keep the computer in the living room so we can keep an eye on what he is doing. Most of what he does is computer game related.

The rule I had for facebook when my daughter was younger was that she could only "friend" people that she knew in real life. They didn't have to be close friends, for example classmates were fine. But she wasn't supposed to friend anyone she couldn't easily verify they were who they claimed to be. As she was a very compliant teen I never had any big problems with this. My DS isn't interested in social media sites like facebook, tumblr, twitter, or google+.

I have heard the same thing in school internet safety talks. The lowest age I saw was 8. They said that it was usually accidental exposure at this age.

I wonder what the average age was before the internet.

Back to the original topics about how to have a 6 year old do a safe search. One thing to do is teach your child how to research. There are a few tricks that will keep the search a bit more safe.

Use multiple keywords in the search. For example type "Gecko reptile" rather than "Gecko". Seems repetitive but it gives one a different result.

Don't forget to use the more advanced search tools, such as the News page. Or options that let you set reading level on the search engine.

Use Wikapedia as a jumping off point. At the end of every article is supposed to be a references section. A well written page will have many references, and I find it easier to find them sometimes this way.

Search in places where you know you are going to get good content. Such as magazines or newspapers. National Geographic, Science Mag, and Discover Channel web sites. Or use them in your keywords for searching. If you know of sites you like, bookmark them for your child.

I am sure there are other suggestions out there.

It was 11.

Lots of great suggestions and food for thought. Thank you all!