We understand how worried you are when children go online. But before jumping into any solution, any parental control app, or even downloading CyberPurify Kids to filter harmful content, it is crucial for parents to know deeply what the online challenges for their children (6-10 years old).
Here you are TOP 3 Internet problems for young children (6-10) and how to stay away from them.
TOP 3 Internet problems for young children (6-10) and how to stay away from it
Digital footprint
Deep into the problem
A digital footprint is data that your child submits, shares, sends, or posts online.
For example: emailing, blogging, updating status, or liking certain pages on social media.
This means that every Instagram picture your child posts, every comment your child posts on Facebook, or every tweet your child posts on Twitter contributes to your child’s digital footprint.
With more schools and employers using the internet as a way to know more about potential candidates, it’s understandable that what your children share and post online can have a real impact on their lives in the future.
At this age, your children become closer to the online community to interact, communicate, that’s why it is crucial to let them understand that once they share or upload something on the Internet, it will stay there forever on it even they delete it after that.
In other words, make them understand the long-lasting effects of what they share to effectively take control of how their online reputation is created.
What can parents do?
As long as you let your children go online, don’t forget to initiate and keep the positive conversation about digital footprints:
-
Teaching children about digital footprints: Everything they share will remain forever online
- Talk about who they share their lives with online
- Know about what information they share with others. Take this opportunity to teach them what should and should not be shared
- Talk about risky behaviors that will be harmful to their online reputation: sexting, online bullying (leaving nasty, hurtful comments), private information, etc.
- Explain what online identity means and how they can reflect who they are in a creative but still safe way
- Make a quick search on Google or social media with their name to know what content is visible to everyone. This allows you to know what content is incorrect or inappropriate (which might be bad for their reputation)
Explicit/sexual content
Deep into the problem
According to Google’s survey, inappropriate content is the TOP 1 risk for your children at home. Inappropriate content that can make children feel upset and confused can be:
- Pornographic/sexual content: this can be a hardcore porn site or an explicit pop-up ad on an online game or an online movie site
- Videos showcasing children’s cartoon characters in adult situations
- Gambling sites
- Horrifying content: bloody dead bodies, bloody accidents, terrorism, murder, etc.
- A forum or group chat that promotes self-harm, crime, racism, eating disorders, suicide
The situation will worsen if your children:
- Use social media before reaching the minimum age (usually 13)
- Play games and use apps that are age-inappropriate
- Watch live streams which may show inappropriate content
What can parents do?
Using add-on/extension has been chosen by lots of parents nowadays and is considered one of the fastest and most effective ways how to filter inappropriate content online.
There are various extensions but BE CAREFUL, there are lots of scams that can steal your personal information or spread malware into your devices.
We recommend you use CyberPurify Kids which are used by 13,800+ worldwide parents only after 9 months of launching (June 2021).
This is considered as one of the best free parental control software to hide 15 types of harmful content on the Internet, including:
- Pornography
- Horrifying content like gore, accidents, ghosts, violence, murder, terrorism, etc
- Content about stimulants, addictive substances such as alcohol, beer, marijuana, drugs, etc
- Content with aggressive elements, hurting others like Hate speech
These free tools to block porn on the Internet can help to minimize your child’s access to harmful content, ensuring a healthy online environment for your child but at the same time, not invading their privacy rights.
CyberPurify Kids is available for Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. We take Chrome as an example:
- Open Google Chrome browser
- Access to Google Chrome Extensions
- Type “CyberPurify” in the search box and enter.
5. Click Add to Chrome > Add extension
6. The result displayed as shown below is that you have successfully installed it.
Don’t forget that
No technological tool works 100% accurately. Don’t depend on it, keep talking, educating your children about Internet dangers, CyberPurify Knowledge is a FREE and QUALITY source about children’s online safety for you:
Sexual predators (online grooming)
Deep into the problem
- What is it?
Online grooming is when a person tries to befriend your children for sexual purposes. Online grooming usually happens on social media platforms and gaming sites.
- Where do groomers usually target children?
Online groomers will target children on sites and platforms that are popular with young people like social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat.
Or with online forums and online games sites, groomers may start a conversation through built-in chat rooms, complementing them, pretending to share their problems to build an emotional relationship, and asking them to continue talking on another private messaging platform.
- How do groomers target my children?
Different profiles use different tactics to groom your children, but here is a typical process that groomers communicate and interact with their victims:
- Groomers use fake profiles to connect and build trust with children on social media or gaming sites. They may not always pretend to be children.
- They build connections by giving compliments on your children (appearance, personality, etc.), pretending to listen to their problems, frequently talking to them, showing great care to them, etc.
3. Once they have successfully built trust, they may encourage your children to:
- Exchange sexually explicit images/videos
- Livestream while being nude
- Engage in online sex roles/conversations
- Meet in real life and have sex with children
- Achieve some financial goals (they may use children’s sensitive content to trade to others)
What can parents do?
- Teach children how to recognize signs of groomers
- Don’t let your kids freely use the Internet. Allowing children with unrestricted and unsupervised access to webcams and mobile phone cameras is a serious threat to children.
- Explain why and how groomers target young children: You can use the information we indicated above!
- Ensure their social media privacy: Teach them how to keep your child safe is on social media, making their accounts private or modifying their privacy settings so they can control who can contact them.
- Create an environment where your child can share anything with you they feel unsafe. A good relationship is the starting point for all. One of the best ways to protect children from online predators.
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