Chapter 6
Warning Signs (What's going on here?)
If you are doing your job as an attentive parent, this chapter may never be needed. However, it would still be good to review some potential warning signs and to be prepared to act on them.
Any problem is most easily solved in its early stages. If problems develop as a result of internet abuse, you want to get them taken care of as soon as possible.
Cleared browser history
We talked about this earlier. This infraction should rate the "death penalty." Your kids should be made very aware of this going in.
Check the kids' browser history on a very regular basis. If a site looks questionable, visit it yourself. I recall seeing sites with provocative names that were actually quite innocent when checking up on my own kids' browsing habits.
Decide what an appropriate "death penalty" is, then stick with it if it must be enforced. Six months offline? Even longer? Make sure the full sentence is served. Your kids have to know that you mean business about this.
The idea is that if your youngster messes up (and they probably will on occasion, just like we all make mistakes), it's better for them to come clean with you about what, when, and where the infraction took place than it is to cover their tracks.
Email problems
It's a sad, sad fact that if you have an email address, you will very soon be receiving spam. Perhaps one day these subhuman genetic mistakes who blast out vast quantities of garbage about pornography, sexual enhancements, and anything else will be corralled, but there's little sign of it now.
For that reason, parents will want to be very leery about even allowing their children to have email addresses of their own. If you decide they can have them, they will need to be educated beforehand on what may arrive in their inboxes, and what they should do about it.
I have been using Google's Gmail since mid-2004. I am very impressed with how it weeds out spam. One of its great benefits is POP3 access. That means you can use an email program such as Mozilla's Thunderbird (NOT Outlook. See Chapter 5) to download email and attachments directly to your machine. Gmail catches the spam at the server before you can download it. You will still want to visit Gmail online periodically to review caught spam. Sometimes, it will catch legitimate mail.
As of this writing, Gmail is still invite-only, but there are hundreds of thousands of invites available. Do a search on Gmail invites, you shouldn't have any trouble finding one.
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