Using parental control software or trusting our children: is safe surfing online so simple?

As a psychologist and a founder of Responsible Surfing parental control software I often have a discussion in my safe surfing lecture on what can we do to avoid that our children are exposed to unwanted material as pornography, hate and violence on the internet. I talk about importance of being with our children when they are surfing and knowing what they are doing online. I also talk about using tools such as Responsible Surfing with porn filtering system, various blocking tools, time management and monitoring tools.

There is always someone that will say during these discussions,” we should just trust our kids”. This is of course a very valid point in the safe surfing discussion and personally as a parent and a psychologist a very important one. But there is two very important points to consider so we will not value the trust in our children as a 100% safety even though they are 100% not thinking about doing anything wrong.

First is that when many owners of sites we do not want our kids to be exposed to are using methods that you can accidentally come across, they use Meta tags and word on the sites that are related to something else than the material they are having on their sites, and kids can accidentally click on those search results links on Google. Until recently The Whitehouse dot com was a site that promoted sexual content and in many of my lectures I ask kids and parents if they were doing an essay on the Whitehouse and wanted to look for the official site (which is Whitehouse dot gov) most people will say Whitehouse dot com. The second thing is that children are not worried about what they may accidentally click on. I have often watched children playing online and look for something.

Children will try to write some of their sport heroes in Google and hit search. Kids often misspell and god knows what they could accidentally come across. As well will kids test some ending on blogs and site names of their own names and test if they find something? These curious seeking behaviors as well how owners of bad content sites are marketing may and will often lead to accident exposure to unwanted materials. Do not get me wrong trusting our children is a important point, but we should also think about the accidents that may happen online in spite of they are trusted and use the safe surfing tools to avoid those accidents.

About The Author-- Bjorn Hardarson is a clinical psychologist. For more information on Parental control software he recommends http://www.responsiblesurfing.com

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