subject: Kids Chat Room | Kids Room [print this page] The internet has made the entire world come together. The sheer mass of communication going on in the Internet makes it entirely impossible to police it. Therefore, along with the various advantages the internet and chat have, the most dangerous disadvantage is the danger of children getting exposed to unwanted elements on the online chat rooms for kids.
Maybe the most hit by unwanted elements in pre-teen chat rooms are children. Children are at a malleable age and may fall in the wrong hands if proper precautions are not taken about their safety. Here are some tips to ensure that your kid is having a safe, secure and entertaining time on the teenage chat rooms.
The first step towards creating a safe atmosphere on the chat communities for your child is by ensuring that they are not addicted to chatting. Chatting should be just one of the social interactions they carry out, and not the only one. This way, children will not consider chatting to be anything else except a chance to make friends and know more about them.
Another important step towards your child's online safety is to make them aware of the various dangers they may face over the internet. Do not keep anything hidden from your children.
Children at a particular age are always in revolt mode and would not like unnecessary snooping around on their personal life. It is always better to have a child cooperate with your security. The best way is to tell your child what you are exactly up to and what you both are put up against.
Also, ensure that as a parent, you take time out of your daily routine and go through the various bookmarks, and chat logs of your child. Being a parent is a huge responsibility, and caring about your child's safety on the internet is just a part of this responsibility.
Though the internet is not all methodical, one can create their own method to create a safety grid for their children. For one, ensure that your kid chats only on sites pertaining to kids and their ages. That way, the chances of meeting anti-social characters is minimized. However, since the Internet is such a free service, this by no means is a fool proof method. A fifty four year old man can pose as a nineteen year old girl and nobody will be wiser until something serious happens.
Also, do not allow your kids to use hardcore chat sites like MIRC. Most of the chat rooms of MIRC are sexually oriented or otherwise not advisable to be used by children below the age of eighteen.
Possibly the best bet of keeping your child safe on the internet is by allowing them to only access moderated chat rooms. Moderated chatrooms are chatrooms which are 'moderated' by the employees of the chat service. The 'moderator' looks after the chats in the room and removes any chatter who acts in any manner not appropriate to the other chatters. This is called as 'kicking' or 'banning' in online chat parlance.
Encourage your child to keep a log of all the chats he or she does with their friends. Almost all modern chat softwares and chat rooms have a inbuilt save function which saves your child's chats in a *.txt format on your computer. If the child is chatting on a website interface, you can always select the entire chat and save it as a *.txt format on your computer.
Try not to have your child use a personal computer till a certain age. If your child uses a common computer at home, you can keep an eye on which chat sites they access and also which websites they access. Therefore, you will always have a general idea of what your child is up to.
