Home and Family Guidelines

• Talk together, share experiences and have fun learning.
• Involve everyone in discussing & agreeing with your family guideline and rules. Remember that sometimes what is acceptable for a 15 yr old child is not appropriate for an 8 yr old.
• Discuss regularly online safety and go online with your children.
• Communication is the key to safety.
• Keep anti-virus, spyware and firewall software up to date.
• Ask your internet provider for a service that filters out inappropriate sites (eg: pornography /race hate /extreme violence etc).
  Enable your ‘browser safe’ search and/or consider using internet filtering software, walled gardens and child-friendly search engines.
• Delay buying your child a smartphone until they are older.
• Show how you will look at the browser history and will expect to see sites visited and will want an explanation should the history have been cleared in any way.
• If possible, keep the computer in a communal area of the house, where it’s easier to monitor what your children viewing. Never let children have webcams, or similar, in their bedroom.
• Talk to your children about why they should not give out their personal details (eg:, real name, address, mobile number, email, school etc) If they want to subscribe to any online service then make up a family email address to receive the mail.
• If you allow your children to use social networking sites (e.g: Facebook), make sure the privacy settings are set either to ‘Friends’ or Customise’ which allows you to restrict posts/photos etc, to be seen only by people you list.
• Insist that your children agree to discuss with you first if they are asked to meet up with some they’ve met online.
• Monitor & restrict the time your children spend online to help prevent obsessive use of the internet.
• Encourage activities away from technology!
• Encourage your children, and all family members, to tell you if they feel uncomfortable, upset or threatened by anything they see online.
• Create a set of family guidelines that all families follow and agree on what will happen if they are not followed.