Times are different than when I was growing up. The internet has added a whole new way to get over on mom and dad. Many parents just cant keep up.

What can you do?

On things for sure, kids will be kids. They are curious. They are going to do things you don’t want them to do. And to be honest, they probably know how to use that beige box a little better than you, so they will most likely not get caught. You want to give them their privacy, so you don’t want to go rummaging through their email, or logging into their Myspace account to find all of the profanity laced messages and comments.

But at the same time, you are the parent. You want to keep them safe, You want to keep them away from certain content (cause we all know that there is some content on the web that is not quite suitable for the little tyke). An you want to maintain that overall parental knowledge and control over what he or she is doing online.

How do you keep your kids safe online without invading their privacy?

One little tool most of us have and don’t know it is sitting right next to your computer

Its called a router.

most routers have tools to manage and restrict internet access. depending on which brand you have, you can block websites, you can restrict internet access based on time. Sometimes you can put different access privileges on different PC’s.

You don’t have to be a PC guru to set it up….Taking a look at the regular Linksys router…a pretty popular router, heres a sample of what you could do.

  • Log into your router…..Type in the routers ip in the address bar of your browser (linksys is usually 192.168.1.1) the login name is blank and the password is admin (if you haven’t changed it)
  • If you have never logged into your router before, or have never changed the password, the first thing you should do is go to the administration tab and change the password. Remember, your kids probably knows how to log into the router too, dont assume they don’t.
  • Go to the access restrictions tab…..there you will see several options to block or restrict internet access.
  • From there you can enter in times you want the internet to be unavailable. or you can just put in websites you want to be blocked all together.

If you poke around the settings you’ll see that there is quite a bit you can do. This way you can keep your kids save, and you can still give them them the privacy you want to give them.

Just remember to click save when you set everything up.