subject: Emails For Kids And Things You Never Want To See [print this page] A true story for you: a young girl, aged ten, got her very first email address. She was so proud, she sent an email announcing this fact to everyone that she could possibly think of and asked for emails in return. They slowly trickled in, but not fast enough for her. Being a smart little girl, she went to her mother's email account, forwarded everything to her own and then started forwarding those emails out to others. Imagine how horrified this child's grandmother, aunts and other relatives were to get a forwarded email from her that showed groups of naked men washing cars or a list of dirty jokes that would have made a trucker pray for forgiveness. This is not an uncommon occurrence, but there's more to this story.
After that child got her email address and started surfing around on the web, she started getting her own mail, including spam mail. Ads for Viagra and similar products filled her spam filter and occasionally made it into her regular mail. Horrified, her mom threatened to take the computer away completely. But there had to be a better way, right?
There are ways to keep better control over what your children are seeing in their emails. You could sit and sift through them one by one, but that can be very time consuming. You can set the parental controls that allow emails only from certain people, but that might not work correctly. You could also use a program such as a kids email service, which filters out spam bad words, images and attachments and also makes sure that you are automatically copied on every incoming and outgoing mail from your child's web address.
In addition to this, you could further increase your parental control by using a kids browser to put a time limit on your children's internet time, lock up the desktop so that your children cannot get into your own files and lock up the other browsers so that they can only navigate where you allow them to.
Thankfully for the little girl in our example, she only sent some questionable photos and jokes to family friends, but there are bad things that happen in emails that travel back and forth. What about all of the children that make arrangements to meet predators by using emails because mom and dad are not reading their stuff or are not aware of who they are talking to online? It is a scary world, especially with the internet making it easy to talk to anyone from virtually anywhere at any time. You would not have a clue that your child was planning to sneak out and meet "Tim" from New York until it is too late, and many parents forget to check those emails even after their child is gone.
Protect your children, even if they think you are cramping their style. The answer to that is a firm "you are ten, you do not have a style yet." Either they can accept the computer rules, or they cannot use the computer at all. It is too dangerous out there not to have clearly defined, non-negotiable rules to work with.
by: Jamie Hanson
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