Email this page to a friend with a personal messageAs a parent one of the most important things that we have to do is to keep our children safe, no matter what environment they are in. What this means is that as our children grow up and become interested in things, such as online gaming, we as parents are going to need to figure out different ways to protect our children. This means is that we are going to need to teach our children how to stay safe online so that they can have fun playing games and that we as parents don't have to worry as much about something going wrong.
Difficulty rating: Easy to moderate
Step One:
The first thing that you are going to need to do to keep your children safe while they are enjoying online gaming is to teach them the most basic rule of online safety and this rule applies to games, chat, instant message, and anything else that requires an Internet connection. The most basic rule for any online program is to never give out full name, full address, phone number or other information that may identify you.
Step Two:
The second thing that you need to teach your children to help keep them safe is that if they are using an online gaming feature like live voice chat or something similar, then they really shouldn't talk to people that they don't know. Basically they want to make sure that they are only talking to friends and relatives with this device. But even if they only add people they know you never know when you will find somebody else using somebody's account so if they are getting harassed or if somebody is bothering them they should place that person on ignore or block them so they can no longer communicate with them.
Step Three:
Something else that you are going to need to do to help protect your children is to have them select a non obvious password or you select one for them. What this means is that you should select a meaningless combination of letters and figures for your password because it has no association with you which makes it harder for others to guess your password. Change it often and never give it out to anyone. You also don't want to choose a password that is identifiable with your screen name such as magicone@hotamil.com and a password of rabbit.
Step Four:
The next thing that we need to do as parents to keep our kids safe is to teach our children that they should not send any material that has sensitive or private content. This is due to the fact that the nature of the Internet and computers causes data flow to pass through many computers in numerous places, so you can not be sure that the information you are sending is secure.
Step Five:
Another thing that we are going to need to do to keep our kids safe online is to keep the computer in a central location. Basically you are going to want to be able to see what your child is doing on the computer at all times. Also by having the computer in a central location children are going to have a harder time hiding things from you in general because you can just suddenly pop into the room to see what they are doing.
Step Six:
But the most important thing that you as a parent can do to help keep your kids safe online is to teach them about basic Internet safety and make sure that your children know they can come to when something is wrong. Basically you want your child to feel that they can talk to you about things without them feeling like you are going to overreact to what is going on.
