Spying On Your Kids - Good Or Bad?

It is always hard to determine how much privacy you should give your children when it comes to the Internet. Some would say that spying develops trust issues between children and parents. On the other hand, by being honest with your child and communicating with them about online risks and safety, you can help build a trust between you and your child.

Sit your children down and talk to them about your expectations of them using the Internet and everything that has to do with the Internet. Explain to them that you would like to have their usernames and passwords for email, web forums and anything else that requires login information. Let them know that this is not for watching their every move, but just so that you check every once in a while.

Set time limits on the computer. You can come up with a certain amount of time that you deem reasonable, and perhaps let them pick the time of day. If not, you can simply tell them what the time will be and go with that.

Finally, install a Parental Internet Monitoring program that will help you monitor what sites your children are visiting and what they are looking at. If you feel that there no real threat or problem right now, but you would like to have a monitoring program for safety purposes, then let your child know that.

If you do know or feel that your child is trying to hide something from you, then perhaps it would be best to install an invisible monitoring program that runs in the background. You might get better results when they don't know your watching.