Internet Safety Tips for Kids and Teens

Despite technical advancement in the internet field, parents are looking for internet safety tips or precautionary methods to safeguard their children from cyber phantoms. You can find dangers in every innovation. The parents should identify those fear factors in cyberspace, which bothers their children. Nowadays, kids and teens have social network accounts and are highly prone to visit different websites frequently. We can not deny that the internet has brought great convenience to our life yet for our young kids, the internet can be dangerous as it allows users to hide their real identity and prey on them. That's why we would need to teach our children about internet safety tips to keep themselves safe.

10 Internet Safety Tips for Kids and Teens

Even though the internet is a place full of changes, you can still find some thumb of rules that can help keep our children safe.

1. Effective usage of Privacy Settings

The parents must help their kids to edit privacy settings on social networking websites. On Facebook, you can edit settings such as ‘Activity’, ‘How people find and contact you’, ‘Timeline’, and ‘Tagging’ etc. When your kids have an account on Facebook, then you must intervene to modify the settings.

2. Be careful while sharing

The kids and teens should be careful when sharing images or videos with online friends. They should not send or post any personal information like phone number, family pictures or videos, date of birth, gender, etc. While creating a profile on the social network, the kids should not reveal their private details.

3. Avoid personal meetings

If the online friends request a meeting, then your kids should ignore it immediately. You must educate your kids regarding the hidden danger in this type of meeting. It is possible that your kids may get exposed to human trafficking or get kidnapped when they are meeting strangers offline.

4. Beware of malware

While installing any software or games from the internet, the kids and teens should be cautious because many viruses and malware reside on those platforms. It enters into your kid’s system in no time. Those foreign bodies interrupt the device's proper functioning and can also cause the leak of personal information.

5. Use Safe Search while searching online

When the kids try to use the search feature, they should be wise enough to follow up with ‘Safe Search’ concepts. The parents should turn on the safe search feature in the browser. This setting avoids the entry of adult content websites and nude images during their search.

6. Protect your password

The parents must educate their kids regarding the value of passwords. They should train the kids not to share the passwords from any source with anyone. Those credentials are personal and are essential for protecting one's privacy online.

7. Beware of the dangers of public Wi-Fi

Public Wi-Fi is useful when you need an internet connection to complete certain tasks, yet hackers can also use it to hack into your computer and steal your personal information. It is recommended to educate your teens not to make any payments or enter passwords for their social accounts while using public WiFi.

8. Report any suspicious account

Online predators may create several social accounts with fake identity to get your children's trust. Parents can teach their kids the ways to identify a fake account and the method to report such accounts. Reporting a suspicious account can help clean the online environment and make it safer for our teens.

9. Don't be afraid to talk to parents

As parents, you should let your kids understand that they can always ask you for help. Should it be being harassed by strangers they met online or being exposed to cyberbullying, let them know that you are always there to provide support.

10. Handle cyberbullying wisely

When kids and teens face cyberbullying issues, then they should know how to get rid of the situation. You can educate your kids to ignore and avoid those chats. If necessary, parents can get involved to help kids find out who is bullying them.

What can parents do for kid's internet safety?

Now that we have learned about the 10 most useful internet safety tips for kids, what can we parents do to keep our teens safe online? Read along to find out things that parents can do to ensure internet safety for teens.

1. Explore the Internet together with your kids:

When you find your kid working on the internet, then stay beside them, and explore the stuff together. You can interact with your kid when he/she wander around cyberspace. Then, educate the dangers they might encounter while making use of this online platform. Show them the real online threats, and give them practical knowledge about the phantoms of the cyber world.

2. Discuss the positive and negative aspects of this virtual cosmos:

As parents, you have to provide the kids with resources to learn about the internet's pros and cons. You have to help the kids to identify the threats before the situation becomes worse. Through effective communication with your kids, you can ensure they make use of the informative world wisely.

3. Set a time limit

Do not allow your kid to be online for long hours and during nighttime. You have to protect your kid during a critical time where the inappropriate stuff becomes active. You have to frame a time limit for the internet and stick to it always.

4. No private surfing

You should not allow your kid to work on the internet privately. He/she must use the gadgets or PC in a living room instead of an isolated place like a bedroom, friend’s house, etc. This makes your supervision better, and your kid will not try out any mischief.

5. Use parental control app for internet safety

Parents always find it difficult when it comes to monitoring the online activity of kids. Most kids have their own mobile devices today, and they can get access to the internet almost everywhere. It is impossible for parents to stand with kids all day to keep track of their online activity. That's why we need parental control app. FamiSafe is an awesome app to monitor the kid’s online activities remotely. It has innumerable built-in features to protect kids and teens from threats on the internet. It is an effective parental control tool from Wondershare.

You may be wondering why I would recommend FamiSafe to you. Take a look at its supported features below, and you will find the answer.

• Extremely user-friendly interface and functions consistently in all situations.
• Record and monitor the data precisely for parents to check and take action if needed.
• Websites filter and browser history record: FamiSafe can filter websites that are not suitable for their kid by category to prevent them from accessing any harmful information. Moreover, parents can check their teens' browsing history and find out which websites they have visited and if they need to take action to guide them.

• Monitor messages on the social platform: Social media are the main platforms where cyberbullying, phishing, and other types of online dangers happen. They may take advantage of things like the Facebook message, Kik, WhatsApp to harass your teens. Luckily, with FamiSafe's Explicit Content Detection feature, you can keep a close eye on sensitive words of your kid's social message and get alerted if any suspicious text is detected.
• YouTube App Control: The popularity of YouTube among young kids also gives illegal persons a chance to reach out to your kids to spread hate speech or other unhealthy concepts. For parents, you can use FamiSafe to keep track of your teen's YouTube activities and block channels or videos that are not proper for them.

Internet safety has been a concern for parents. It does not only require us to teach our teens about internet safety tips but also needs us to get updated about kid's activity online. Thus, FamiSafe is the perfect app to supervise the online activities of the kids precisely. It is the foremost responsibility of the parents to provide a safe internet platform for the children to explore their skills. The remarkable features of FamiSafe assist the parents to build a secure fence around the kids amidst the online monsters. With the help of FamiSafe, you can create a virtual eye watching out the kid’s gadget activities remotely. You can download, register, and explore the striking aspects of FamiSafe parental control software.