The internet is an amazing resource of information and entertainment. It is also a forum in which people can communicate with one another from all over the world. And best of all, the internet is not exclusive. Anyone can take part in online festivities. Even children can navigate the internet but that might not always be a good thing. Those with teenagers and youngsters need to remain aware of steps to promote child safety online. A child can confront a number of risks surfing the internet. Here are ten reasons why parents need to monitor their children's internet use:

1. Children place themselves and their parents at risk for cyber identity theft if they give out personal information online. There are many unethical people out there seeking to compromise other's identity. You do not want your children falling victim to such individuals.

2. Children do not realize how common cyber identity theft on Facebook is if you provide too many personal details about yourself. Parents need to help boost child safety by preventing the young ones from offering too much personal information in the context of their Facebook profile.

3. There are all manner of Trojans and viruses a child can accidentally download to a hard drive. Once these viruses and Trojans are inside your computer that can initiate all manner of identity theft actions. Your passwords could be compromised; your personal files and folders copied, and your keystrokes can be logged. Once this occurs, such information could be uploaded to another site where it will be effectively compromised by identity thieves. This is a serious problem and it is one that also needs to be avoided. Parents need to be aware of the files children are downloading and if they are visiting sites where malicious Trojans are known to prey.

4. For older teens, there is always the potential for them to get involved with credit card scams. Child safety online does not stop at age 18. In fact, parents may need to be more diligent in monitoring internet usage to prevent any serious financial disasters the teen may get into.

5. Examine the history of the websites that your child is visiting. By taking this action it is possible to stay in the loop as far as knowing what type of websites your child is visiting and how often. Gaining access to this type of information makes it possible for you to discover any problems at their earliest inception and to avoid unpleasant surprises. There is internet monitoring software that allows you to do this with or without your children's knowledge. However, this is an issue that every parent must take with their own children. However, it is worthy of noting that many employers now monitor the internet usage of employees and the caring role of a parent to their children is greater.

6. Internet stalking is a common problem teens and children will deal with. Those with Facebook profiles may very well find them at great risk for stalking. The most common form of stalking would be repeated emails and messages. However, if personal contact information is provided on the Facebook profile, stalking can escalate to phone calls and even visits to one's residence. To greatly increase child safety online, you need to reduce the potential for online stalking. That is a must.

7. Chat rooms (online communal instant messaging rooms) frequently remain the most potentially dangerous for adults and children. The reason for this is that it is easy to remain anonymous in a chat room. This opens the door to all manner of immoral characters to take advantage of the unsuspecting. Chat rooms are notorious for sexual predators which further adds to the danger of such rooms.

8. Chat rooms have grown into places where cyber identity theft is becoming a consistently serious problem. Those that wish to avoid having any member of the family's identity compromised needs to monitor chat room activity.

9. Cyber bullying is another issue that needs to be addressed when hoping to boost child safety online. Cyber bullying is really no different than traditional bullying. The main difference is that it utilizes the communicative nature of the internet to perform the bullying actions. The psychological impact remains the same.

10. It is never a good thing from a social perspective for a child to spend too much time online. Parents need to monitor their child's online activities if for no reason other than to prevent the child from becoming limited in his/her social interactions.
These ten reasons only scratch the surface of the subject child safety online. Regardless of the reason parents employ to keep children safe, the bottom line here is you do always need to keep the younger more inexperienced family members safe when they are surfing the net. Too much can go wrong if you do not.

Cyber Bullying and Cyber Threats are serious problems

Would I know if my teenager was being bullied over the internet? This is the question that every parent of a teenager needs to ask themselves if their child is using social media regularly. There are too many parents of teenagers who suffer a mental breakdown are distressed when they discover that their teenager was receiving threats over the internet, but they didn't know about it because they didn't want to interfere. Every parent should read about Cyber Bullying and Cyber Threats.

Author's Bio: 

Jack Taggerty is a freelance journalist who is a parent and grandparent who has taken particular interest in cyber security. He owns a number of websites and blogs and has published numerous articles. If you want to learn more about cyber bullying follow this link http://cyber-bullying-prevention.com/. If you are a small business owner or work from a home office and are concerned about identity theft and computer hacking follow this link www.identity-theft-scout.com/computer-hacking.html