The way we used to communicate a while back is different today. The eye to eye interaction is slowly dying as many prefer reaching out with their family members and friends through Social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Whatsapp, and many others.
People spend hours in front of screens, chatting, watching videos, or playing games with colleagues online. These changes have affected many people’s habits, which the minors pick. Undoing technology is not possible, but there are ways you can protect your minors from habits that may endanger their lives online. For instance, parents can learn from Rudebaguette, who has been very instrumental in championing about online child safety.
Here below, we see the best ways you can have your minor use the internet responsibly, even in your absence.
Install Anti-Virus Software
When minors are navigating online, they are not aware of sites with malicious links. Installing antivirus can prevent from damaging your devices as children are more susceptible because they cannot tell what is suspicious and what is not. Make sure you install onto your family’s computer and their mobile devices. And to save you from spending extra dollars, you can use a free anti-virus program as they can prevent and detect suspicious content online.
Instead of warning your minors from going online, teaching them how to use the internet carefully can save them and you as well.
Use Child-Safe Browsers and Search Engines
For your child’s safety, you can guide them to use the internet through a child-friendly browser. Today, some browsers enhance children’s safety when surfing online. Sites such as Zoodles can be a good deal for your child as it creates a safe and friendly environment plus features options like ad blocking and time limits. Also, Chrome has a way you can set up a Supervised Profile to restrict your minors from visiting certain websites. With such, you can even monitor sites your child has visited online.
Set Social Media Privacy Controls
When you see your minors set up Social media accounts, take that chance to set privacy controls to their accounts such that only family and friends can access what they are posting. To those sneaky minors, you can set up the controls unaware as they are not very much advanced to understand more about Social media accounts.
Also, you can take the initiative to educate them on the importance of having privacy controls. That way, they can change their privacy settings willingly without feeling coerced.
Enable Youtube’s Security Features
Nowadays, adults to minors are consuming lots of video content, especially on YouTube. The platform has thousands of educational and even entertaining videos, but some of them are not friendly to children. To avoid your child getting exposed to video content that can affect his or her innocence and age. The process is easy, and going straight to YouTube setting, then account, you will enable the “restricted mode,” which helps to hide any video content flagged by YouTube as inappropriate.
Conclusion
As a parent or guardian, you need to keep learning in ways that you can protect your minors. Mostly, nowadays, technology is advancing very fast, and how you used to do things last year may change the current one. But trying to keep up for the sake of your child can benefit them a lot and prevent them from getting exposed to dangers.
