7 Reasons Why Monitoring the Online Activities of Your Child is Essential
With each new day, there seem to be new and more parental responsibilities to fulfill. If you are a parent, your role as a parent will keep on changing as your child grows up and encounters new experiences in different stages.
While taking care of a newborn baby seems to be challenging raising a teen is a more challenging task. Teenage is a very crucial period of life where you get to learn a lot of new things. It is the stage of growth, exploration, and risks. And nowadays, due to the advancement of technology, the internet plays an essential part in the development of a teenager’s life.
When it comes to monitoring your child’s internet activities, it is not about privacy, but it is about their e-safety. Giving your child privacy to explore is a very important part of supporting their growing independence because in this stage they will learn to handle new ideas, emotions, and interests with independence and responsibility.
But, as the teenage brain is still developing, they might sometimes make quick decisions and might not always think about the consequences of their actions and behavior. This means that your child needs you to stay in touch with them so that you can provide them with proper guidance about what is wrong and right.
But as most teenagers need privacy and independence, you must know how to monitor your child differently from when they were younger.
Why teenage monitoring is essential?
The internet is also known as a ‘big city with no police; therefore, it is important to guide your child in it. You may get concerned about disturbing your child’s privacy but as a parent, you must know that the only shield protecting your child from online dangers is you. With the rise in cybercrime rates and cybersecurity breaches, you must deal with everything for your child’s safety.
The top 7 reasons why monitoring your teenager’s internet activities is important are:
1. Cyberbullying
A lot of teenagers who are being harassed online by cyberbullies go through an emotional breakdown but never tell their parents. Monitoring your child’s internet activities can alert you if someone may be bullying your child or if your child has been bullying someone else.
2. Online Predators
The internet is the most used tool of child predators for finding and developing friendships with children. Monitoring will help you to know if someone has been talking to your child and trying to be friends with them.
3. Identifying the bad friends of your child
Some of the friends of your child could be trying to convince him to engage in illegal activities such as shoplifting, trying drugs, or doing something which goes against your family’s moral values. Monitoring will help you to get an idea about it and you can probably take out time to find out how your child feels about such things by bringing it up in a very neutral and friendly manner.
4. Identity theft
Teenagers are prone to give out too much information as it is quite easy to convince them. This makes it easy for hackers and fraudsters to steal your child’s identity to open credit card accounts, social media handles, or other instances of fraud. Monitoring your child’s internet activities will help you to protect your child from such unwanted dangers. Ensure you review anything they like to sign up to like customer loyalty schemes for example.
5. Protect your child’s personal information
Teenagers often unintentionally share a lot more about themselves and their whereabouts than they should while talking to someone online and it indirectly helps the dangerous “digital strangers” to easily locate them in the real world.
6. Limit their screen time so that they can engage in other activities
Parents who monitor the online activities of their child are more aware of how much time their child is actually spending online. Once they get to know this, they are more likely to place limits on screen time. This is very essential as your kids also need time to be active in various other activities and exercise their minds in other ways.
7. Chat rooms
Chat rooms are not only most potentially dangerous for children but also for adults. This is because it is very easy to remain anonymous in a chat room, opening the way to all types of immoral characters to take advantage of the unsuspecting. Chat rooms are notorious for sexual predators which further adds to the danger of using such technologies. These sexual predators often use chat rooms to search for victims and teenagers can easily fall into such traps.
CONCLUSION
With the growing technology, the internet has evolved to be a source of both information and entertainment. It has also become the most used tool for communicating with people around the globe. But, like everything else, even the internet comes with its own set of risks.
So, if you are a parent of a teenager then it is very mandatory to monitor their online activities. Your child can confront several risks on the internet and as a parent, you must protect them from such dangers. If you feel that your child is falling into any online trap, immediately hire a private detective London to avoid such unwanted situations before it gets too late.