What is Parental Control Software?
The Internet can be a scary place. Child molesters lurk in chat rooms pretending to be 13 year old girls, and pornography is everywhere. It is easy for an innocent child to click a bad link from search results and get a whole lot more than they bargained for. As if that isn't scary enough, children are being bullied electronically, and internet rumors make the rounds even faster than they do in the halls at school. Luckily parents can use parental control software to protect their children from Internet threats.
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It used to be common wisdom was keep the computer in the living room so the kids won't be doing anything they shouldn't online. Unfortunately this doesn't prevent accidental viewing of pornography, and unless you're reading the text of their emails and chats, you won't know what's being said.
Child safe browsers can protect small children by only showing search results from sites approved to be safe. Until your child learns how to switch browsers, that is, which is probably going to be about a week after they start surfing on their own. A child safe browser also does not protect your computer against stray or random clicking by overzealous children.
The real solution to protecting your children from the internet, and your computer from your child, is parental control software. This software falls in to two basic categories - monitoring software and filtering software.
Filtering software does just that. It filters out websites you don't want your child to see. These can be sites you enter in yourself, for instance you can filter out youtube or MySpace. Webmasters who run pornographic websites also sometimes register their websites with filtering companies, opting to volunteer to have their sites blocked from children's sight. Other software bans websites if they show a large amount of "hot" keywords. Unfortunately they can be a hindrance if your child is doing a research paper on breast cancer, or the history of the gun.
Monitoring software generally only gives you recordings of screen activity, chats, and some software will even give you your child's log in and password information so you can access anything they may be posting to social sites on the web. This won't protect your child from stumbling across pornography, but it will sure show you how long they stayed on the site. Some of this parental control software will even send you copies of all sent and received emails, both sides of online chats, and lets you see screenshots of your child's activities online. With some programs you can even shut the computer down remotely.
Monitoring software can watch all the people using your computer, a useful tool for people in a roommate situation, or when one spouse is suspicious of another. It can give you solid proof if someone is using your computer inappropriately.
Some of this software can also block your child's access to parts of your computer. You can make sure they don't add or delete files, monkey with your control panel, or read your private documents. Some parental control software will even let you set up personalized schedules for your children, letting you decide what programs they can have access to on what days of the week and at what times. It can also log individual children on and off the computer at specific times.
In today's dangerous times, parents really need the tools parental control software can give them. You can protect your child from Internet threats today.
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