Protect with parental controls

Safeguard your computer and protect your children from unsuitable Internet content

By Sandy McMurray

When Patricia Paddey was growing up, her family had just one telephone, located in the kitchen. “I don’t think I ever had a completely private telephone conversation as long as I lived at home,” she recalls. “I don’t remember the lack of privacy ever bothering me. Looking back, I think I actually appreciated knowing that someone who loved me was always close by and monitoring what was going on in my life.”

Paddey is now a writer who works from home. She has three children who all use the Internet. “Thus far, we’ve been extremely careful and only allowed them to be on when we can be in close physical proximity. But our oldest recently begged to be allowed to open a Windows Live Messenger account to chat with friends. I have to confess, the whole thing makes me nervous!”

Help is available for parents like Paddey, who want to protect their children’s safety when using the computer to chat or surf the Internet. There are many ways you can monitor your child while online. But good computer safety also starts with your computer.

Some software has built-in protection called parental controls for younger users. For example, Encarta has parental controls for its dictionary to prevent kids from looking up inappropriate words. And Windows Media Player 11 has parental controls based on film ratings that can prevent DVD movies from playing.

Take control of the computer

Sharing a computer used to mean that other users could see your private files, install games or software you didn’t want or change your computer settings. In Windows, it’s easy to set up personal profiles for each of your children, so they have access to their own list of programs and favourite web sites.

The operating system allows parents to create Limited accounts on their computer, which only allow children to open files placed in the Shared Documents folder. Children will not be able to touch your personal files or other programs elsewhere on the computer.

To set up a new Limited account, click the Start button > Control Panel > User Accounts and Family Safety > User Accounts and then follow the instructions.

The Performance Plus feature regularly defragments your hard disk, removes unnecessary files that can slow down your computer and helps make sure important security updates from Microsoft are installed. Protection Plus helps protect your computer from viruses, worms, Trojan horses, hackers, phishing and other threats.

Restrict access to the Internet

For children and teens who want to explore the Internet, parental controls make it easy to monitor and protect kids online. Parents are able to manage which sites children can see, what games they can play, how long they can spend on the computer, what applications they can use and whether they can download files.

To set up Parental Controls, click the Start button > Control Panel > User Accounts > Set up Parental Controls > On. From here you can specify the settings you want to control, such as web restrictions, time limits and games.

Parents can also monitor what their children are doing on the computer with activity reports. Parents can see which sites their kids are visiting and who they’re talking to online. Once you turn Parental Controls on, under Activity Reporting, click On > Collect information about computer usage. To view the reports, click View Activity Reports.

Using common sense and these technological helpers, parents can make it easy for their children to explore the online world safely.