The internet has become an important tool in the education and upbringing of kids today. Through the guided use of the internet children will cultivate the habit of learning independently. Their ability to use sites like Google will aid them in doing their homework and learning other things on their own thereby reducing their over reliance you.
It is a fact that broadband is expensive in most part of the world but nothing good is achieved on a platter of gold. There are so many useful websites that kids can use to supplement their learning at school. Sites like khanacademy, graphite, bbcbitesize, wonderopolis, pbskids are very useful in this direction. Parenting also has these ten sites which can aid children in the edutainment. Some may argue that the use of the internet by children comes with its own consequences but so does every good thing. The important thing is for parents to regulate its use and make sure children are using it for the purpose for which they secured it for them. They can achieve this by making it a point to always check the browsing history of their kids and also blocking certain sites which may be harmful to them.
Cyber bullying is on the increase and so parents have to be very vigilant about when their kids do online. Because of the emergence of social media platforms like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Instagram of which children are a part, they get exposed to strangers and bullies very early in the lives. In recent times some children have committed suicide because their colleagues bullied them using such cyber platforms.
One sure thing parents can do is to teach children about digital citizenship and also be a role model since they are likely to visit your page on social media platform. If they visit your page online and realize that you are putting out nonsense, they sure will follow suit.
Parents can also create an account on
these platforms and befriend their kids and set rules concerning responsible
use of the internet whose punishment is taking them completely of the net if
the go contrary to these rules. This way you have access to their wall and will
be able to know if anyone is trying to hurt them using the cyber platform.
Educate kids about privacy settings on social media and have them log into Facebook Twitter, Google+ and check their privacy settings. One good way to stay safe online is to set their profiles to private so that only people they invite can see their post. When an account is set up on social media everything is public by default and kids may not know who is seeing the information they post online it therefore behooves on caring parents to help their kids to manually edit their privacy setting by using the settings tab.
Educate them about the danger of posting certain sensitive information online and advise them not to give out personal information to strangers online. For example it is important for them to know that the less selfies the put on line the better. They should also not advertise their location online as this could lead to a breach of their personal security.
Encourage them to create a strong password which is normally a combination of letters, alphabets and symbols and change them after every three months. They should desist from using their date of birth or the pet name as a password. The best password is forming a sentence that you can easily remember and using it as your password.
A more radical approach to controlling your kids online will be to agree with kids less than sixteen years to have access to their passwords if they want to create an account on social media otherwise they should not be allowed join such platforms. Though some may see this as overly intrusive of parents, you will agree with me that it is better to invade your child’s privacy than for them to commit suicide because there was no supervision of their activities online.
It is also important for parents to
set time limits on how long their kids can spend online. Some children spend so
much time such that they end up becoming antisocial. Kids need to balance their
the online life with real world activities.
No comments:
Post a Comment