Do you know what is really going on when your kids are online?

Computer are great and I have spent nearly 17 years making my living in this industry but not only that, they are the best tool for your child’s’ education. Now days in the age of the Internet, it's essential for our children to have a good computer skills and be proficient in the use of Internet. And quite frankly most of them do and in alot of cases they have more knowledge then their parents. Personally, I would have loved to have had these resources at my fingertips when I was doing my studies.

Sadly though, there are huge risks for our children when interacting online. Problems that are encountered these days include exposure to:

• cyberbullying
• cyber stalkers
• sexual predators
• pornography

Here is an image that really drove the piont home for me.

As a mother of two teenaged children,  a 17 year old son and a 13 year old daughter, I was very disturbed to see these statistics quoted by these reference sites.

Personally, I would really want to know if any of these types of predators or bullies were harassing either of my children, but the reality is that we can't be looking over their shoulder all the time and sometimes our kids try and handle these situations by themselves and don’t share this information with their parents or teachers.

Earlier this year a 14 year old Melbourne girl tragically committed suicide as a result of cyberbullying. And last year Megan Meier, a 13 year old from Missouri in the US who struck up an online friendship on the popular social networking site, MySpace, with a person she believed was a new boy in her hometown. In actuality, the "friend" was a group of individuals, including adults, who were intent on humiliating the poor girl because of a friendship with another child that had gone sour. Again tragically this resulted in Megan committing suicide.

Come on people we have to take this seriously!

I know there’s an old adage of "Sticks and Stones will break my bones but name will never hurt me." But this is not true and especially for kids during their teenage years where they are undergoing so many changes, their self esteem is very vulnerable.

So what can we do to protect our kids?

I don’t know about you, but I certainly like to meet my children’s friends before letting them go to their homes or go out with them socially. But this is a bit more difficult online. However in my investigation into this subject I came across an interesting piece of internet security software. This software monitors keystrokes, records websites visited and also takes snap shots of the screens and can then email the results to you. If you are interested, you can find more about this software here and download a free trial. There is no substitute for good open communication with your kids, but sometimes they just don't want to tell you whats going on, particularly if they find it embarassing.