As a society, we are always looking to make things easier on ourselves. But I worry about that and what it is doing to our mental and physical health. You don’t have to look far to see how we have been effected. And the internet has taken us leaps and bounds forward in our drive towards convenience. Without leaving your home you can do your grocery shopping, get a college degree, play poker with friends, plan a vacation. You almost don’t even have to get up from your chair ever. If only the Internet could provide us with a virtual toilet that we can really use!

While shopping online is a great way to find shopping bargains and playing poker online may be a lot of fun and chatting with friends is a great way to stay connected, if you find that you are spending hours every day on the internet, consider whether you may have an Internet Addiction. Many people shop too much online, develop compulsive Internet gambling problem, become addicted to watching porn on the Internet or just waste hours of their time on the Internet in place of facing real life.
Enjoy the Internet. But be careful it does not become an addiction!

But don’t dismiss the idea because today, as unfortunate as it is, any home with an Internet connection should really have a web filter installed. Many people call it a porn filter since porn content is what most people think of when you talk about protecting children online.

When I first got involved in Internet safety issues, I assumed it was enough to keep an eye on what my children are doing on the computer and to set some guidelines for them to follow. That may have been true many years ago, but today, it is different.

1. Children can view pornography online by accident. The average child today is exposed to porn online by age 11. It surprises no one anymore to hear about a child seeing porn before they even know how to read!

2. The type of porn they can see is much worse than what the adult generation could have been exposed to as children. It is not simple seeing nudity or even just sex. Hardcore and violent pornography are readily accessible to anyone at anytime with no barrier to entry. There is no way for websites to make visitors comply with minimum age requirements. Further, anyone can upload  sexual content to Youtube or countless other websites that have no regulations concerning the content they host.

3. No government authority is able to monitor or control the content that is available online. Anything goes.

4. When children are exposed to pornography and/or violence online , it can be highly traumatic. Further, they frequently do not tell an adult about the experience for fear of being punished. And even more concerning, the younger a child is exposed to pornography, the more likely he is to develop a porn addiction. Mental health professionals tell of children as young as 6 showing symptoms of porn addiction!

5. Children are using computers outside their own homes – at school, the library, at friends, via smart phones. The risk of exposure is growing.

6. In addition to porn addiction, exposure to pornography effects the development of healthy sexual attitudes.

Install a porn filter. Be a responsible parent.

Here are their features as appear on their website:

McGruff  SafeGuard buys me some peace of mind but it dose not replace my involvement in the day today lives of my kids. Trust needs to be built up and a delicate balance needs to be achieved between trusting our kids and safe netting their online environment.

Parents can’t be expected to supervise and control what their children see or hear via the media 24/7. But setting up some rules, communicating openly about what is and is not acceptable and using available tools to monitor and guide children can help create a safe environment. I recommend a book by Brent and Phelecia Hatch called Raising a G-Rated Family in an X-Rated World. The book is not so much about blocking kids from accessing what is out there but is about raising kids with discipline, respect and core values to help them control what comes into their lives and make the right choices. Integrating such a perspective into your family life will give you more peace of mind than feeling that you always have to run along side them to filter out what they should not see. It’s about empowering them to handle it themselves — and everyone will feel better in such an environment.

 Many do inform their children and use it as an opportunity to address the various concerns, so that the child will understand that there are real and valid concerns. Parents’ best resources are their own kids for information and education on Internet safety since children today are often far more Internet savvy than their parents are. Many problems can be avoided if parents have an ongoing dialog with their kids about their  Internet activity. Of course many parental control software applications can not actually be hidden from a child since the moment they do try to go to an illicit website, the software (such as Optenet PC) blocks them and they see a blocking screen. This in itself can be educational — a sort of reminder that some sites are not appropriate for them, even if they thought they were. In the case where a parent suspects some problem, it can be helpful to take a look at what a child as been doing online. For example, a parent may discover that their teenage daughter is frequenting diet sites and/or sites that act as support groups for anorexia (supporting the phenomena not recovery!) and in this way, learn about a very serious problem early enough to take preventive action.

One of the challenges the Internet presents to us as parents is the easy access our children have to non-filtered information. In the same way we can trust that the local library does not provide our children with books providing tips on how to take drugs, we should be able to create an Internet environment in our home that does not provide access to such information. Keep reading here for more information on how to manage your family’s Internet access.