Your kid loves PC. And you, though would love him to be a tech wizard also get jittery when he spends long hours in front of the screen. The stories of paedophiles lurking the Internet, kids going to porn sites and chatting with strangers give you nightmares. Cheer up, you are not the only one. Just like PCs have become an integral part of lives for most kids. The fear of them falling prey to wrong information or company too haunts most parents. The social networking sites have only added to their worry. Most of these parents often wonder: how to regulate their kids’ Web surfing, the time they spend on the PC, who they talk too online and what they look for on the Net. For all those worried parents out there, here are some ideas to keep tabs on your kid’s computer activity.
There are several tools available which will help you do the above. However, which one of those is for you depend upon the operating system you have installed on your PC. Here those who have upgraded to Windows Vista are a bit lucky, as the operating system comes with a set of Parental Controls feature. These can be accessed by opening the Control Panel and clicking User Account and Family Safety, and then clicking Parental Controls.You can use Vista's Parental Controls to set up a separate user account for each of your children. Remember that you have to set yourself as the administrator to do this. You define the administrator account when you first install Vista. After that you can add additional accounts that can then be controlled by the administrator. You can password-protect the administrator account so that your kids cannot gain control of it and change their access settings.
With Vista's parental controls, you can impose limits on all sorts of activities, including the hours they can log in and use the computer, whether they have access to the Internet, which sites they can and cannot visit, and which programmes they can and cannot use. You can even get an activity report that details exactly what your children have done while on the computer. Vista's Parental Controls also allow you to block games by rating, content, or name. Once you activate parental controls, you can determine whether a specific user account can play games at all.
If you're using Windows XP or an earlier version of Windows, you can use the parental monitoring programmes available on the Internet. Cyber Patrol (http://www.cyberpatrol.com) and Safe Eyes (http://www.internetsafety.com/safe-eyes) have both been ranked high by independent testers.These tools provide many of the features found in Vista's parental controls and add a few additional benefits, such as the ability to text message, e-mail, or even phone you at work if kids attempt to break the rules. The downside is that these applications focus on Internet activity alone.
