Making the internet a safe zone for our kids

Parents of today are faced with an unusual challenge: the ever-expanding digital world and how to safely navigate both themselves and their children through it.

“Kids don’t tend to understand the permanence of digital actions, that what they do online now can follow them around for the rest of their life,” says Stuff Fibre’s managing director Sam Morse.

“In our household my wife and I place a lot of emphasis on helping our children be good digital citizens and to behave appropriately online. It’s really important they don’t ‘friend’ anyone on social media that they don’t already know offline, and to ensure they’re not posting anything they shouldn’t,” says Morse.

But, of crucial concern for parents is a lack of visibility over their children’s internet use. Unlike watching television, which is often a shared experience according to the 2015 Children’s Media Use Study, 85 per cent of Kiwi children aged six to14 independently access the internet.

The same survey found parents are the key online content decision-makers for most children until the age of eight, at which point a majority (59 per cent) are finding content for themselves. At age 11 there is a ‘tipping point’ when YouTube and Facebook use increases significantly.

Alarmingly, Netsafe has found that one in five New Zealand high school students have reported being cyber-bullied.

So how do parents balance a desire for their children to learn, discover and interact with the enriching things the world wide web has to offer, while also being acutely aware of what could go wrong when their kids are granted such freedom?

Surprisingly, it’s uncommon for New Zealand internet service providers (ISPs) to offer parental control tools. But Morse felt a real responsibility for his startup Stuff Fibre to provide a tool that can help to give parents peace of mind.

“Collectively, the Stuff Fibre leadership team are parents to 15 kids so internet safety is a big thing for us.”

He said the team spent a long time considering the development of Stuff Fibre‘s parental control tool, SafeZone. Available free to all customers, the tool is simple to use but equally it’s highly customisable.

Morse explains they’ve developed SafeZone profiles that suggest filtering content based on the age of the child. Currently these are young child, young teen, mature teen and open. The open profile protects everyone from malicious sites, while other filters available include those for the main social media sites, adult content and file sharing sites for example.

from Eve’s Feed http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/86546448/Making-the-internet-a-safe-zone-for-our-kids

from
https://evewilki1971.wordpress.com/2016/11/21/making-the-internet-a-safe-zone-for-our-kids/