Internet Safety
Think U Know is a fun / interactive website from the CEOP giving great advice on how to have fun, how to stay in control and how to report incidents when surfing the net, using mobiles, gaming, blogs and chatting online.
Controls are not a single solution to staying safe online; talking to your children and encouraging responsible behaviour is critical. However, controls are a vital first step to helping to protect your child online, and here seven simple things you can do:
- Set up home broadband parental controls: make use of controls on your home broadband.
- Set controls on your search engine: encourage your child always to use child-friendly search engines and activate and lock the safe search settings on the browsers and platforms they use.
- Make sure every device is protected: controls should be installed on every device your child uses: mobile phone, tablet and games consoles (both home and handheld).
- Privacy settings: activate the safety measures offered by different sites; social networking sites like Facebook have privacy settings that will help prevent your child seeing unsuitable advertising.
- Block pop-ups: if you’re worried about your children accessing inappropriate content though accidentally clicking on adverts in pop-ups, BBC Webwise has advice on how to stop these.
- Find good sites and agree on them as a family: by talking to your child about their interests you can help them find suitable sites to visit and apps to use. Review these sites as they get older.
- Manage their use and access: your child may be less likely to let you know they’re distressed by something they’ve seen online if they think you’ll take away their internet access but it may be appropriate to do this in some instances. Be aware of this when talking to them, and let them know they can talk to you or a trusted adult whenever they need to.
If you have any concerns be it for yourself, a friend of a family member, we are here to help.
For more information on internet safety visit www.thinkuknow.co.uk