Monitor Your Child’s Blog
Blogs are becoming more and more popular, and this popularity does not only affect adults. Young children are also increasingly interested in blogs. With the advent of social networking sites such as MySpace blogging is growing by leaps and bounds. Users now have a variety of options to publish and maintain a blog. In addition, the growing popularity of blogs currently available promotes an interest in blogs with other Internet users.
Children are bombarded daily with a variety of blogs available online and are naturally interested in creating their own blogs. In most cases, kids create blogs for social reasons, but there are savvy kids who realize the profit potential of blogs. While there are many benefits for kids to blog, there are also risks. Therefore, parents should carefully monitor their child’s blog as well as all his internet use. This article will discuss in more detail the topic of following a child’s blog.
Discuss blog expectations with children. The first step that parents should take when a child is interested in creating a blog is to thoroughly discuss the expectations with the child. The child and parent should have an open and honest discussion about responsible use of the Internet. This is important because these conversations can lay the foundation for the child’s behavior online.
There are certain dangers that exist on the Internet, but parents who understand these dangers and communicate with their children to share this danger potential as well as information about online safety are likely to have children who stay safe online. When a child is considering creating a blog, the parent should be involved in the process from the beginning.
The parent should not only be aware of the child’s intention to start blogging, but also be aware of why the child wants to blog and the intentions for the blog. This is important because it can help parents establish proper guidelines for the blog. For example, a child may be interested in social media through a blog, but must understand that there is a potential danger with this type of blog.
Parents should impose limits on blog content and should advise children to avoid disclosing personal information such as their full name, address and phone number on the blog. Other information that can be used to identify and locate the child should also be avoided. In addition to discussing blogging with the child and establishing ground rules for blog content, parents should also visit the blog regularly to ensure that the established rules are followed.
Parents should regularly review their children’s blogs, but should not inform children when these exams will take place. This will help prevent children from editing the blog to eliminate questionable material during the review and replace that material once the review is complete. This is important because it would be quite simple for the child to make changes quickly by simply saving the files and replacing them with appropriate blog posts during scheduled revisions.
Parents should also consider regularly monitoring the blogs their children visit. This is important because the information children view online can be harmful to children. This is also important because most blogs offer visitors the opportunity to communicate with the blogger. In most cases, this communication is in the form of comments that are left for the blogger and the blogger can choose to respond to these comments.
In some cases, the visitor may even have the option to provide personal contact information to the blogger. Parents who stay up to date with the blogs their kids visit can look at them carefully to make sure their kids aren’t behaving inappropriately online and inadvertently putting themselves in danger with the actions they take.