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Tiscali: Protect your Family

Protect your family

Read our top 10 tips on protecting children online. They are intended purely as a guide and aim to offer sensible but practical advice for parents and guardians.

Take personal responsibility

Ensuring your child's safety is your responsibility as a parent or gaurdian. Define for your family what is acceptable internet use, and what is not. Boundaries need to be understood by all parties.

Educate Yourself

Look for local resources like computer or internet classes at a community college or evening classes at a local school

Learn how to use the tools your children use on the internet like chatrooms, instant messaging (IM), internet service providers (ISPs), e-mail and message boards.

Identify websites that you would like your children to explore.

Identify websites that you would like your children to avoid.

Learn the internet habits of your children and their friends.

Learn the danger areas for children using the internet.

Use existing online resources to further your internet education. See the links from this page for starters.

Talk with your Children

Clearly communicate your goals and values, your expectations and what you consider to be acceptable uses of the internet.

Spend time using the internet with your children. Talk about the fun things as well as the dangers.

Use the ICRA Children's Bill of Rights for the Internet, available from http://www.icra.org/kids/billofrights/ as a starting point for a discussion.

Visit some of the sites from our helpful links page with your children to learn about safety on the internet and how to report dangerous or illegal material online.

Place the computer in a common area of the house

Do not let your children have free access to the computer and the internet at all hours and without any supervision.

Set parameters and agree to ground rules

Use the ICRA Family Internet Contract as a basis for the rules of engagement on family internet use. Rules should include:

Keep all personal information private. Define personal information clearly to include name, address, phone number, e-mail address, school name, parents' names etc;

Use nondescript screen names;

Do not give out credit card information over the internet;

Don't talk to strangers.

You should clearly define:

How long your children can spend online each day;

Which internet sites they can visit;

How dangerous it may be to open things from people they don't know or trust.

Enforce the rules

Revisit the ground rules periodically to make sure they match up with your children's ages and maturity.

Post the ground rules in a place visible to both you and your children. How about on the PC Screen?

Learn about technological tools

Tools like filtering software or other safe-guarding programs or options can help. Make your choice on the basis of the crieria important to you and be prepared to accept that it may take more than one tool or programme to assist.

Revisit your settings every three to six months to make sure you are current with the technology and the data you are monitoring.

Offline meetings are a no-no

Do not let you children meet someone in person whom they met online without your permission or without another responsible adult present.

The UK government Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) now gets over 3,000 grooming reports a year. CEOP says one in four of our children may eventually meet up with someone they first contacted online, compared with one in 12 just four years ago. Most of these encounters may well be perfectly innocent. Others may not.