Safety

The prompt for today is SAFETY. Specifically, what do I think the best way to protect my child from online predators.

SHEESH. Can't we have a shallow topic?

Well, I will take a stab at it. I don't think I have a good plan for that right now. When we still had dial up (super super slow) Internet connection, I would have said that having dial up is a pretty good protection cuz.....it isn't all that appealing to be on the Internet when you wait forever for pages to load. But now we have high speed so that is no longer a deterrent.

For our family, I would say that Cole is more careful than even John or I as far as the information privacy piece. He uses smart passwords and doesn't fill out any questionnaires online for the games he plays. He seems more aware about some of the pitfalls than we do and he is not looking for trouble.

One time he was playing a game against other unknown people in the cyberworld and one of them asked him for some information and Cole just ended the game. I asked him if he ever has anything weird happen online and he said he never really had but someone asked him how old he was once and he just didn't answer. I just reinforced that by praising his decision.

It is so scary when you don't even have the skills to double check what they are up to but at least for now Cole is pretty compliant and isn't looking for problems.