Those sunny summer holiday days are over and so your children, instead of spending their time playing outside or on the beaches, will be back in front of their computers, tablets and smartphones busily exploring online encyclopaedias and dictionaries to help them prepare their coursework for the school term in complete safety.
At least, that’s the idea – but in reality, as well as a wealth of useful material, kids can easily find undesirable content like pornography or violence or sites focused on drug abuse.
That is why parents need to pay special attention to their children’s online activities. Here are some recommendations from Kaspersky Lab experts to keep your children safe in cyberspace during the 2015 school year:
Limit the amount of time kids spend online
It’s good for kids to spend some time online, looking up educational information and even playing games, chatting with friends or hanging out on Facebook sometimes. However, everybody would agree that most children are probably spending too much time online. That’s why it is important to have strict guidelines about the time a child spends on a computer.
Before setting these new rules up however, parents should have a heart-to-heart conversation with a child to explain why these time limits are important.
Control the content
Another piece of advice is to set clear ground-rules about what children can and can’t do online and to explain why you have put them in place. Rules should be reviewed as children grow up. To make sure that a child complies with them, we’d recommend using the Parental Control feature, incorporated into Kaspersky Internet Security – multi-device 2015.
This enables parents not only to limit how long their children can use the Internet, but also to block access to inappropriate sites and games and prevent personal data being shared with others. Websites and games are divided into categories, based on their content and the child’s age. Parents can also easily view detailed reports about what their children have been doing online.
Share some advice with your child
When having a talk regarding the new rules with children, parents should share some of these tips with them:
* Do not make your private information available to the public or send it to strangers, especially your contact details, address, your school, and so on. By “strangers” we mean any people of any age you don’t know in real life.
* Don’t accept any requests to meet in person from strangers
* Don’t tell anyone your phone number or e-mail, or publish it on a social network page
* Don’t click any links from unknown senders
* Don’t trust tempting messages of any sort – free stuff, discounts, increasing your reputation/likes/stars on some site, etc. Just delete such messages and don’t click any links
* If something happens online that makes you uncomfortable, or you start getting messages from people who worry you, tell your parents to get their help in solving the problem
