Good Parenting

Forums are places to maintain life-conversations.

A lot of participants are in groups together for a specific subject like e.g. soccer, music, general talk, TV-program and so on.

A forum is a good opportunity to talk to different people from all over the globe; you obtain different opinions about a subject because you talk to people with different cultures and education which makes it very interesting for everyone inside the forum. These forums are searched a lot from every one and groups of all types of ages. Your child is connected with elder people.

You have the liberty of free expression that’s why you also can talk about pornography and everything else on forums. There is only a limitation depending on the type of threats you are replying. But there is almost every type of subject within the forums and a lot of forums are looked out for from people who like to harm your kids. In forums your kids know a lot of people from everywhere and not everyone in a forum might have good intentions.

Freaks are looking out everywhere for a victim.

If your kid is connected many hours to the internet you as parent should always be aware of the security of your kids with anticipation. Talk to your child frequently and never deny any answer to your children, speak always open minded with your kids. Your child has to feel your support and confidence in what ever he or she asks.

At an early age the kids might see their computer more like a toy for the use of interactive games and chatting with their friends. But when growing up and the use of the internet for a source of information they will more and more discover that this toy called computer can do more than play games.

Every adult or child can look up for offers they are interested in just by typing a certain word into the search engines and they will find thousands of pages on almost every subject of interest. The pages sometimes contain information over drugs, alcohol, tobacco, money-games, pornography and so on. There is also a lot of content out there about hate, violence, discrimination. Everyone is telling you that the forums on the internet are the best place to get customers for business and the sane is valid for freaks to get in contact with your child.

How to protect your child and avoid health damage?

Supervise your child that he or she is not alone on the computer late hours at night.
That there are no suspicious phone calls for your child.
That there are no gifts coming through post mails.
Take notice when your kid turns the computer off when you enter the room.
Supervise the hours your kid is connected to the internet.
Check your kid’s behavior in relation to the family that she is not living her life separate from the family.
Observe that she is integrated to the family environment.
That your kid always informs you about her activities on the internet.
Censure and control the access to adult material you as parent or anyone in charge of taking care of a child’s health has the responsibility to control the activity and emphasize the danger and risks of the internet.

How to protect your child against bad influence?

There are a lot of organizations and providers or suppliers of programs and software to block certain information o to block access to “improper” sites.
You also can filter some words that you think there are not suitable for your kids. The disadvantage of the filter system is that when typing for example the word “Sex” your child gets also denied the access for “sex-education.”
It is sometimes difficult to work proper with filter-systems. In many cases it is proper to inform yourself of the possibilities to protect your child when buying her/him a computer.
We ask a lot of information when we buy a car or any utility for our house but we forget to ask for information when we buy something for our kids and especially when it’s called computer.

The computer is one of the tools in our today’s society that can harm the mental health of our kids more than anything else. You as an educator or parents are mostly not aware of that fact. There are millions of new sites every day that makes it impossible to separate the good from the bad. Therefore it is your obligation to educate your kid and equip it with as much as information to protect it against bad influence.