But answer yourself to the following questions and see if your child is having a safe online browsing while you are solving everyday problems.

• Is your child online late at night?
• Is your child creating profiles on social networks or using microblogging services?
• Is your child alone for most of the time during his or her online sessions?
• Is your child spending the majority of his or her time online in chat rooms?
• Does your child minimize the screen on the computer when you walk by?
• Do you notice several programs showing in the task bar at the bottom of the screen, but no programs active on the monitor? This is a sure sign that something your child does not want you to see is hiding in the task bar.
• Do you know all your child online friends or it has in list unknown persons?
• Did your child give private information to strangers?
• Is your child hesitant to talk about or evasive in describing his or her online experiences?
• Is your child more addicted to Internet than playing outside with his friends?
• Is your child spending lots of time playing games? (This might take to game addiction).
• Is your child exposed to violent, pornographic material on the Internet?
• What is his general mindset? Is he a risk taker? Is he too trusting of other people?
• Does he communicate with you about his life in general, including school and activities?

If you have answered to all these questions than you definitely came up to a conclusion regarding your child online activity. If you think that your child might be at risk that you should take some action. There are lost of solutions, but the first think you have to do is to talk with your child. Explain to your child what Internet is and expose him the dangers he might encounter.

What people don’t understand is that the best way to protect child is through education. And to support my saying I can give you this link and read by yourself what experts are saying about online education. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2007/07/23/tech-online-predators.html)

There are also other solutions. For example you could install on your child’s computer parental control software that will block or restrict his activity. These applications are very useful and your child will only be able to browse the web at specific hours, on specific web pages, without the risk of being exposed to inappropriate content.
If you want another alternative, you can choose to hire a nanny. Of course this solution is more expensive and involves more resources. But when it comes about your child’s security nothing is more important.

From my point of view the best defense against online dangers is education, but I guess each parent know what’s better for his family.

Then, when I was doing some research for today’s article I thought that this issue could be good to discuss about it. And so I discovered that there are parents really concerned about their children activity on gaming and gambling sites.

Many kids use the Internet to play online games. But often when you use search engines to find game sites, you also find gambling sites. Banner ads and pop-ups for casinos are everywhere on the Web. While games sites are free and usually feature card, arcade, puzzle game types with automatic tracking and scoring, gambling sites involve winning or losing actual money.

Due to the nature of Internet, online gambling sites cannot physically check a visitor’s age or prevent them from accessing the site.
However after reading several online releases and visiting online gambling sites (yes I did that to see how `easy` can you sign up), we’ve come up with a list of things that us, as parents, can do to protect our children from online gambling risks.

1. Check where the kids are going online and what they’re doing;
2. Establish rules about what games they can play;
3. Remind them that it is illegal to gamble and explain them how usually gambling works and that it can be addictive;
4. Make sure you check every time they ask you about your credit card number or other personal/financial data;
5. If you use these kind of software, make sure you don’t use the `save password` feature;
6. Create separate profiles for children on your home PCs;
7. Use parental control software.