Keep Personal Details Private
One of the key elements to staying safe online is keeping your personal details private. Make sure that you tell your kids and teenagers not to give out their personal details online. They should never give out email addresses, phones numbers, which school they attended, sport clubs or any planned trips or their home address to people they have only ever had online relationships with. If they give out these personal details they are opening themselves up to a number of potential problems.

Junk is Junk
Educate your children about spam texts and emails. Point out the signs and signals that flag something up as spam. If they receive spam show them how to delete and quarantine the material and explain that they should never reply to spam or use any of the tools that might come with the spam email.
You should never open emails from people you don't know and you should teaching you children the same thing. It could contain a computer virus or worse an inappropriate image or video.

The Internet is not private
It is important to stress to your children that the internet is not a closed private space. They should not post videos, photos or comments online that they would feel uncomfortable with you as a parent seeing. Teenagers often feel that they can take risks online that they wouldn't take in daily life as no one will find out. This is not the case and placing risky material online can leave them open to cyber bullying or blackmail.

Don't befriend people you don't know
One of the really important things to educate you children about is that they should never start friendships with people online that they don't know offline. This is difficult but comes down to the old maxim of not talking to strangers. Your children need to be aware that it is very easy for people to create fake profiles and not be who they appear to be online. Friendship requests on social networking sites such as Facebook & Bebo should only be accepted from people they know offline in the real world.

If you discuss these points with your children and talk openly about the dangerous nature of some activities on the internet then it should be easier to keep them safe online. Internet safety in many cases appears to be basic common sense to adults but you need to make sure your children and teenagers are informed about the basics of internet safety.

I'm a father of four (nearly five) kids and an internet professional. I think its important to keep your kids safe online. Visit Know the Net for more information about internet safety and How to use the internet.--> http://www.knowthenet.org.uk/knowledge-centre

By Antony Heywood