Internet Safety Tips For Teens & Parents - Filters & Monitoring Software

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Here are some good guidelines for keeping your children from viewing objectionable internet sites:

Place your family computer in an open area of the home rather than tucked away in a remote room.
Set your computer up so it requires a password. Then, if you leave your teens home alone, you can prevent their access.
Use both a monitoring software and a filtering software. It is important to show your children that you can always check to see all the sites they have visited. It is also important, however, to prevent them from visiting the most objectionable sites. We use both Spector (by Spectorsoft.com) to keep a record of screenshots of all sites visited and Cybersitter (see Cybersitter.com) to filter out objectionable content. There is another software package called Guardian Monitor that both keeps a record of screen shots (like Spector) and has internet filtering ability. Since it costs less than Spector does now, it might be worthwhile, especially if it does a good job of filtering.Click Here To Learn More About Guardian Monitor
Chat rooms and other areas of the internet where kids interact with strangers are always an invitation for trouble. In our internet filter, we can make such sites off limits. Email for older teens is OK, provided it is email sent/received to/from friends that are well known.
A nice benefit of Cybersitter is that you can turn access to the internet off completely - this is our favorite option for the family computer. We only turn access back on in supervised settings. This option is something to look for in any filter you get.
Filtered internet is offered at http://www.afo.net/. Some friends of our use this service and like it. "Filtered internet" means that what you get is filtered at the server before it gets to you rather than being filtered on your computer.