Do your kids have a facebook account? As a parent it is natural to be worried about our children and to make sure they are doing all they can to be safe online. Internet predators are all over the place and it’s a growing concern that they are using Facebook and social media sites to find their prey and target on your children. Here are some ways that kids can be safer on Facebook and how parents can help their children to be safer.
Tip # 1 – Talk to your kids
One of the first things you must do is to talk to your kids about internet safety and to make sure they are not adding strangers to their account and also giving out their personal information. Make sure they aren’t giving out the password and user name of their facebook page to their friends as this can not only lead to malicious comments being posted on their accounts but it can leak out to other people as well, causing a lot of problems. Parents need to have open relationships with their kids when it comes to the internet and to ensure they are doing all that they can to be safe. Getting involved with your children’s online activity will allow you to trust them as you know they understand the rules and they aren’t violating them.
Tip # 2 – Report fraudulent and malicious behavior
It is very important that parents get a facebook account as well so they can monitor what is happening with their kids facebook account. There are a lot of kids out there that are just malicious and they will end up doing things that can really upset your child like posting a mean picture of them or spreading lies. It may be a good idea to speak to your child about deleting their account if you notice their self esteem is taking a serious hit because of the other kids on facebook. They also have the option to remove all the friends and to set their profile to private where they can actually be invisible, so they are able to speak to the friends that are actually good friends to them. What you can do is click on “report message” if you start getting malicious emails and fraudulent emails. Facebook will be able to remove photos that are not within their terms of use and you can report a photo. You can remove a tag of yourself as well so it won’t be linked to your photo. However the other person will still have the picture on their account and you should block them from their page as they aren’t a true friend to you.
Tip # 3 – Monitor the Chats
One of the nice things about Facebook is that you can talk to your friends on instant messenger. Only your friends will be on the chat sessions so make sure that your kids are only adding the people they are really friends with and not other people that they don’t know. The online predators often use the chat sessions to get personal information out of kids by using manipulative language that often causes them to give up personal information or to even consider meeting their new friend somewhere. Be sure that your kids know about online predators and that they are being very careful with the chat sessions and they aren’t agreeing to talk to people they don’t know. Facebook does have a feature so you can go offline when you are using facebook so you won’t get involved with the chats, which can also be damaging if your kid doesn’t have good friends on facebook.