As a parent and someone who partners with parents, keeping kids safe is huge deal. With social media only growing in size, influence and reach, parents need to be actively looking for ways to monitor their kids online lives. I know that there some parents that would disagree with monitoring you kids online lives. The truth is that social media is a new reality that isn’t going away no matter how long we keep our heads buried in sand.
The risks of you kids doing, seeing or meeting someone or something online that will cause them harm are very high.
I came across this link in my feed reader talking about Child Safetyweb. They provide monitoring across social media sites based on keywords that you as a parent need to know. They have a very compelling tagline on their main page. “Everyone on the web knows what your kids did last night. Do you?”
If you have kids in your home that are online check out Safetyweb right now. You will be glad you did.
thanks for sharing this Sam!! passing it along to the parents in our church!!
The bottom line is that if parents REALLY want to keep their kids safe online, they need to know what they are doing on the computer, and what is happening in their online lives. Education is a great thing, and very necessary, but how can you consider yourself educated if you don’t know the simplest information – like what your kids are really doing on the Internet to begin with. If you have monitoring software, like our PC Pandora (http://www.pcpandora.com), you will know everything they do and will be able to talk to them about it. If you aren’t monitoring and don’t know what they are really doing, how can you be sure they are safe? It’s not an issue of privacy (I have no idea where and when kids were granted endless privacy because they exist – in my day privacy was earned through trust and an established good behavior record), nor is it an issue of trust – it’s called being a 21st century parent. If you don’t know what your kids are doing online, you aren’t doing your job as a parent. If you aren’t monitoring what your kids do online and watch them, someone else will…