Brian has the only certain answer, but it help if a parent (or grandma) explains clearly why this is done, telling the child in simple words that there are cruel people in the world who tell lies on the inter-net specially to persuade young peole to do wrong and unpleasant things.

I agree with Rachel. It is MY responsibility as a
PARENT to control what my children do. Passing this
responsibility on to others is akin to the fox watching
the hens. All of you lazy parents out there, do your
job, please!

I hope haven't misunderstood what you were trying to say Tina. ISPs and PC manufacturers would argue (rightly) that it is not their role to act as the 'internet police' either:

a) Without explicit consent
b) Without that practice being regulated, and
c) Without the costs being passed on to all consumers

It is our job as parents to take the time to research the best way of monitoring what our children do online, and especially, how we can protect them against people who might want to abuse them. I thought that was what we were supposed to be discussing?

In my view, it is my parental responsibility to take the time to investigate every option, or combination of options, and then implement them. An earlier correspondent mentioned that she used the Tiscali child protection software, and reviewed it favourably. I suspect I probably need 'net nanny' in conjunction with the Tiscali chat monitor software. I'm also talking to my kids about this and encouraging them to talk to me. As a parent, I cannot fathom why this should be anyone else's responsibility?

So how does a computer novice put something like net nanny on their pc without knowing their children have disabled it. I think the problem we have here is our lack of knowledge of the computer. As parents, it's difficult to keep up with all the latest software we need to protect our kids! No wonder they can do what they want online, I just don't know what they are up to and don't think it's fair to stop them using the PC just because I don't understand it.

Net Nanny is an internet content filter. It's not bad, but it's not great either. It's not particularly secure either.

Net nanny monitors, blocks and reports on which websites your children (or other web users in your network) use. It also has Activity/Consequence controls, whereby individual rules or warning messages can be applied to specific actions.

However, the overall experience is disappointing. Though it's straightforward to set up and use it's too easy to detach Net Nanny, using a couple of simple tricks. In fact, it's so easy a child could do it, and did!