Internet Parental Controls

Last week, I met my friend, who told me that her 6 year old daughter has registered her name in a gaming website with her e-mail id !!

Yesterday, I logged into an educational games website for my son and was shocked to see him watching a video of 'Iron man', after sometime!!!

It's getting more and more difficult to leave kids online. Launch a 'normal' website and you can see a lot of ads poping up or appear inline, including ads with adult content! Get into 'You Tube' to watch a video, all related/unrelated videos line up in the sides. It's just a matter of clicks for kids.

Internet has become the buzzword of the current generation. It has turned to be an inevitable need. But like every new technology, it has its own pros and cons. How do we safeguard our children from the 'cons' without losing the 'pros'?

Parental controls come to our rescue.

I'll explain here how to do it on a Windows based PC.

First and foremost step is to set up a separation user account for your child.

Go to Control Panel --> User Accounts and Family Safety --> Parental controls and turn it on for your children's id.

This only provides a basic control. For advanced options, Windows Live Family Safety is the way. However this needs a Microsoft provided id, like Hotmail, Windows Live etc. and is less effective as this is a web based tool. Parental controls provided by anti virus/internet security software are more effective and reliable. The below steps explain how to set up parental control in Kaspersky Internet security suite.

• Open Kaspersky Internet Security and click Parental control.

• Select your child's account and the below screen appears.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Now you see a list that you can setup. The below screen shows how to block websites of some category and also specify exclusions. Depending on your child's age, you can decide on the categories to be blocked.

• The below is internet usage, where you can set a download data limit and time limit.
  
  
  
  
  
• You can also control File downloads.

It's done now ! Similar setup could be done with other antivirus internet security software except for slight variations in the setup.

Setup is done.. But don't you still want to monitor your child's activity for the day? Here you go..

Reports option provides a detailed browsing data of your child.

There are other reports for checking the file downloading, internet usage etc..

What else ? Setup Parental controls and let your child explore the internet world safely !!