Do You Have a Safety Plan?

A growing concern with parents is their children’s safety online. They don’t know if their children are equipped with the skills to deal with online interactions, and how to be safe while online.
You should talk with your children about how they behave online. First and foremost, you should teach your children that a stranger online is just as dangerous, if not more, than a stranger on the street. While I don’t want this article to be filled with scare tactics, the topic itself has that tone.
Just as in real life your child should not give out personal information such as their address, phone number (cell or home), birthday, your work address or phone number, or their school information (location, grade, classes, etc). They should treat conversations online like phone calls, if they are alone and someone asks if they are, they should not admit it. In a future article I will touch base with online social sites like FaceBook and MySpace where some of these activities are more accepted.
You should set up rules for your child’s online experience. This should include when and where they can access the Internet. These rules should also have what services they may use online. They should include or disallow Surfing The Web, Instant Messaging (AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo!, MSN, etc), Social Websites (FaceBook, MySpace).
I mentioned setting up rules for where your child can access the internet. This is due to the fact that there is a distinct possibility that you have a laptop in your house. Your internet accessible computers should be in common rooms or studies. Teens and young children should not have access to the internet in their rooms for many reasons including monitoring. I will touch base on this later. Finally, have an open door policy with your children. If they run across material that makes them uncomfortable, whether this be a website, a forum posting or an instant message, they should be comfortable enough to come to you to express how this makes them uncomfortable or talk to you about any other feeling or concern they have.
Once you have your rules, you next step is to set up consequences for infractions. Children are children, they will try to bend the rules as much as they can. We typically learn by making mistakes and learn by the consequences of our decisions. It’s our duty as educators and parents to be there to make sure that they can pick up the pieces and put things back together.
I hope this article hasn’t scared you too much. If you have any comments, questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to contact me directly and I will get back to you as soon as possible.