Wouldn't it be nice if your kid or teen always checked with you before they went online or tried to visit a questionable website? Even better would be if you were able to control the types of sites they could visit on the vast World Wide Web! The reality, sadly true, is that the Internet makes it so easy for kids to browse freely and access sites with content that may or may not be appropriate for them. Besides, our lives (which gets busier every day) make it more and more difficult for us to constantly watch over where our kids are going online. As moms, we want to trust our kids online, but it's even better if we can use tools to help use keep the bad influences at bay.


The AOL Safety Toolbar is an alternative to traditional heavy parental controls PC software. It's a light-weight web filtering toolbar that filters inappropriate content and provides built-in "family-friendly" search results. This free toolbar is designed for parents who want to safeguard and monitor their children's Internet browsing and works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

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The internet has been at your fingertips everywhere you go with your cell phone for a while. However, it is no longer just the techno-guy in your life, it is seemingly everyone. For example, the iPhone came out with the next version in early July, people stood in line for hours to make sure they got the latest and greatest. Not that the old iPhone was going to stop working, but people wanted the newest version. People I know, who have never been particularly techno-savvy were talking about how excited they were to get the new gadget. Anne Collier at NetFamilyNews.org hit the nail on the head - people are not carrying cell phones anymore, they are carrying full blown computers that are connected to the internet. She highlights a few statistics from Pew research:

We are half way through 2010 and solidly into summer vacation. How are the settings on all the parental control devices you use working for your family? Strange question for July? Maybe - but as our children grow, their needs change. Your parental control settings you have on the computer might still make sense, but they might not. Instead of waiting for the end of the year or for birthdays to modify the settings, take the time to check now without the hustle and bustle of the holidays taking all of your time.

Look at the parental controls on the computer. Do the settings make sense for each user of the computer. You can normally have logins for each user of the computer. That way you don't have to have the same restricted settings as your 8-year-old son, and you can allow your teen more freedom.

Is your gaming system connected to the internet? If so, make sure the parental control settings make sense for each person who plays.

Most cell phones can both take pictures and connect to the internet. Luckily, most cell phone companies also have some level of parental controls on them. Like computer parental controls, the settings for cell phones will also change over time. Maybe the setting you wanted to use last time wasn't there, but it is now? Maybe it is time to allow more freedom than you had before?

Each child is different and every family is certainly different. There will never been a technical solution that is better than parenting. But sometimes parents need technical help with parenting situations. Enough.org has a check list of Rules 'N Tools that you can use to help in the decisions for you family.

According to Enough.org, the mobile phone is not only a communication device; it is a $1 billion adult industry fueled by users accessing adult content via the cell phone. This is not counting the user-generated adult images that are being sent over and over and over again using cameras that are built into most cell phones. Yes, I am talking about sexting.

Sexting isn't making anyone any money (that I know of), but 3 in 10 young people report being a part of some kind of naked sexting (either sending or receiving). One in 10 report sending a naked picture of him or herself. This translates into more people sexting than using their cell phone to access pornographic web sites.

Parents are shocked by this, but some teens just see it as a part of life or no big deal.

So what now? We educate the youth. We (as parents) spend time talking with our kids about the realities in the world. We incorporate the new technology into the teachings at school, and we hope for the best. All we can do is teach them about using technology responsibly and the risks that they face. It is up to the youth to decide what to do with the information.

What are your thoughts on how to best educate the youth about the dangers of sexting?

About a month ago, I posted an article about the U.S. Supreme Court hearing a case about texting and if a California police officer should have privacy relating to his texts sent on a department issued pager. As expected, the case was decided in June before the break. The court found that the police department did have the right to review the texts of the officer who was using a department pager to send sexually explicit texts to another person.

Just like the fact that schools have the right to search lockers and companies have the right to read employee email, the decision is not limited to communications via company email.

The next time I use company email to confirm dinner plans with my husband, I will keep this decision in mind. Even though it isn't too personal, I know that my boss could read the mail if she had cause to check my mail. Will this decision make you change your behavior with company cell phones, pagers or email?

Most parents are still shocked by the sexting reports involving teens, but this Australian report says that they may not be registering with teens in the same way.

This leads to another question of mine. Are teens, and eventually society, going to be so desensitized to what is now considered to be shocking behavior online? 150 years ago it would have been shocking to see women wearing pants in public. 100 years ago it was shocking that women were fighting to vote. Couples being divorced was shocking in the 1950s.

What do you think? Will hot news stories about teens sharing inappropriate pictures online even be newsworthy in the future? Or is this something that will still be shamed in years ahead?

When Obama was first elected President, he made big waves by insisting on keeping his BlackBerry. He won that battle and became the "first e-mailing President". The next logical battle in the White House was bound to be how much time the first daughters can spend online.

First Lady, Michelle Obama told CNN that in their household, there is no TV, Internet or phones for the kids during the week. I am curious how Sasha (age 9 this year) and Malia (who turns 12 this year) feel about this policy.

What are the rules in your house about Internet, TV and telephone use?

My name is Francis Duncan. I have been guilty of using company time, the company computer and even company e-mail to send personal e-mail. That last one to my father about his up-coming trip could have waited until after hours, but I sent it during office hours.

According to this MSNBC article, I am not the only person to use company resources for personal reasons. This one more personal than my example: "Jeff Quon, a California SWAT sergeant, was given a pager from his employer, the Ontario Police Department. He was later found to have used the device not only for work but also for pleasure, often sending sexually explicit text messages to his wife and his mistress."

Quon's employer found out by reading the texts, siting that the pager was "owned by the department". Quon felt that it was a violation of his privacy. The courts were brought into the mix and it is now going to be escalated to the Supreme Court to determine if the department had the right to read the texts.

The Supreme Court heard the case last Monday and a decision is expected by the end of June.

Regardless of how it turns out, this will effect most workplaces. What do you think the outcome should be? Should the messages be kept private? Or did the department have the right to read them?

I have a cousin who lives in Alaska. I have known her mother, but various circumstances have prevented my cousin and I from meeting in person. Especially in the last couple of years, I have talked to my cousin over the phone and through letters several times. When she found out I was on Facebook, she immediately sent me a friend request. Since then, we share pictures of our expanding families and keep in touch pretty regularly.

Apparently this is not uncommon. According to this article from the U.K., one in five families keep in touch via social networking sites.

Many decades ago, families didn't stray go far from home as they grew. Now, a very large percentage of people I know have moved far from their hometown. As people are more and more mobile, the Internet is being used to keep families together. It may not be as good as the family dinners, but it is better than nothing.

Do you keep in touch with family online more than you do in real life?

In honor of the season, and to procrastinate the Spring cleaning I need to do on the house, I did some research to find out what I should do to keep my computer clean. Here is what I found (and links to the sources). Disclaimer: I am far from a technical expert. These are general tips, but if you have specific questions, it is best to ask a computer technician.

- Rearrange Files: PC Magazine describes how to defrag your hard drive (PC users). This process will take apart files and put them back in order to maximize space on the hard drive (kind of like what I should be doing in my hall closet).

- Back Up, Back Up, Back Up: Thriftyfun.com reminds us to back up important files regularly (before losing that irreplaceable picture of your kids). You don't need to back up programs if you have the original disks, but do back up the files you created. This would include pictures, documents, etc. and put them all on an external hard drive, CD or some other system. This is also a good chance to delete the duplicate files you have and getting rid of the pictures you don't want to keep.

- Dust Off the Computer: This one is also from Thriftyfun.com. I won't tell you how much dust and who knows what I had on my top of the computer tower in my office. I'll just remind you that this is also good to do a couple of times a year. Maybe more.

- Out With the Old: Microsoft lets us know that it is OK to delete that program that you got a few years ago, tried once and never used again. Really - it is OK. Even if you did need it in the future, it has probably been updated so many times it is worth starting from scratch anyway.

- Don't Forget the Kids: SafetyClicks reminds you to review the parental controls you have for your kids. Look through sites the kids request access to, see what they have been doing. Is it time to adjust the limitations now that the kids are getting more mature and their needs are expanding?

- Nothing Replaces You: Again from SafetyClicks. Talk to your kids about how to be a responsible digital citizen and what you expect of them while they are online. Even if they roll their eyes, you can make sure your kids get the message about online safety if you tell them.

Do you have any other Spring cleaning tips for the computer or online safety?

Hateful words, mean actions and ongoing tormenting of anyone can only go so far before there are severe consequences. This is proven, sadly, with a suicide case in Massachusetts. A teen, Phoebe Prince age 15, took her own life after months of what is described by the prosecutor as "tortuous harassment". There are currently nine teens charged (some being charged as adults). The teens being charged probably never thought it would go that far.

I don't know what makes people be so cruel to each other. I wish I knew how to stop it. What has been shown to us stories such as this, by the time teens are telling adults about the torment they are feeling, it has gone too far. We, as the parents, the educators and the "trusted adults" need to listen to them when they tell us that they are being picked on. 34% of teens say that it helps to just tell an adult who will listen.

The Prince family is in my thoughts.

If you could go back in time and Phoebe came to you, what would you do to try and help?

There is a debate about how or if parents should use spyware on their kids' computer to find out what their kids are doing online. This is a debate between parents, but is not a legal debate. Apparently a high school in Philadelphia took this idea to another level.

A Pennsylvania school district is being investigated by the FBI for remotely activating the web cams on the laptops they issued to students. The school district says that they were wanting to track online behavior when the students were supposed to be doing homework. The parents of these students disagree, saying it was a clear privacy violation. It is still unknown how the FBI will find, but I would not at all be surprised to find this a question posed to either the state's or the U.S. Supreme Court.

What do you think? Privacy violation or good intentions communicated poorly?

After watching MTV's "When Privates Go Public", I was reminded of my own high school career. I didn't have the technology that is currently available, but I saw myself in the students that were featured. The girl was naive and thought her boyfriend would never betray her trust. I was reminded how my trust was betrayed by my first love. The second student was frustrated and did something without thinking. I was reminded that I am really glad that there isn't documentation of things I did without thinking when I was a teen. As I listened to their stories, I was touched not by their story as much as how easy it is happening to youth who you would never expect.

The two stories featured were a young girl who sent a topless picture of herself and a boy who forwarded a picture of his girlfriend from his cell phone. She ended up having her picture sent to everyone in not only her school, but other schools as well. He was convicted as a sex offender and is facing those consequences (including not being able to get a job or even live with his father because of the proximity to a school). Neither person was anyone I would think would even think of doing anything like this. Both described that 'they didn't think' anything bad would happen and certainly would never have done it had they thought about consequences. I could see myself in both of these young people.

The entire episode is available online. I re-encourage you to watch it with young people in your life. It is an important topic that might lead to helping them think about consequences.

Once you watch it, post your thoughts about the documentary in the comments. Do you see yourself, or your kids, in those featured?

You may know YouTube as the place you saw that funny video. Maybe you watch and share family movies uploaded to the site. But maybe you are like Cecilia King of the Washington Post who was watching "Dora the Explorer" videos with her daughter when she came across "Dora on Crack".

YouTube is a great tool to share videos of your own and to watch the latest viral videos making their way through office buildings across the country. The challenge is that sometimes there are videos that are NSFW (not safe for work).

Thankfully, YouTube recognizes that not all videos are appropriate for all ages and came up with a Safety Mode. Similar to AOL Safe Search (YouTube filtering videos, while AOL Search filters search results), when it is in use it will not surface videos that are not appropriate for either viewing at work or viewing by younger users. Safety Mode can be set each time you go to the site, or can be permanently set if you login to your account. Kudos to YouTube for making our family viewing (and office viewing) that much safer.

What other safety tools do you know of?

CommonSenseMedia.org put together a great list of parenting tips for cyberbullying that I want to share.

• -- Give them a code of conduct. Tell them that if they wouldn't say something to someone's face, they shouldn't text it, IM it, or post it.
• -- Ask your kids if they know someone who has been cyberbullied. Sometimes they will open up about others' pain before admitting their own.

Parent tips for elementary school kids

• -- Keep online socializing to a minimum. Let them use sites like Webkinz or Club Penguin where chat is pre-scripted or pre-screened.
• -- Explain the basics of correct cyber behavior. Tell your kids that things like lying, telling secrets, and being mean still hurt in cyberspace.
• -- Tell kids not to share passwords with their friends.

Parent tips for middle school kids

• -- Monitor their use. See what they're posting, check their mobile messages.
• -- Tell your kids what to do if they're harassed. They shouldn't respond or retaliate, they should block bullies immediately, and they should tell you or an adult they trust. They shouldn't delete the messages because in persistent cases, the content should be reported to a cell or Internet Service Provider.
• -- If your kid is doing the bullying, establish strict consequences and stick to them. That goes for mean or sexual comments about teachers, friends, and relatives.
• -- Remind them that all private information can be made public. Posts on friends' walls, private IMs, intimate photos, little in-jokes can all be cut, pasted, and sent around. If they don't want the world to see it, they better not post or send it.
• -- Don't start what you don't want to finish. Game chat can get ugly fast. Make sure your kids are respectful because hurtful retaliation happens all the time.

Parent tips for high school kids

• -- Tell kids to think before they reveal. At this age, kids experiment with all sorts of activities, many of which should not be made public. Remind your teens that anything they post can be misused by someone else.
• -- Remind them they aren't too old to ask for your help. There are things some kids can handle on their own, but sometimes, they just need help. Coming to their parents isn't baby-ish, it's safe.

All the advice I think is great, but I especially like the tips for older teens. When I was in high school (aka, the age that I "knew everything"), I may have hesitant to ask my parents advice. Being reminded by my parents that it was still OK to ask advice helped me.

What other advice would you give to parents regarding cyberbullying?