Tips for Teaching our Kids to be SAFE Cyber Citizens

Tips for Teaching our Kids to be SAFE Cyber Citizens. Parents often feel they are loosing touch with technology and their kids will always know more than they do when it comes to the internet. Parents can feel more comfortable if they take a step back and look at the internet technology from a single view. It does not matter what the new service is, the behaviour should always be the same. We need to teach our children to be SAFE CYBER CITIZENS.

 It was only in the last 10 years that Chat Rooms were popular, and the norm. We then progressed to Instant Messenger programs such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger. Social networking sites were next, and have only been around for 5 years.

 Yes, we here about Facebook almost weekly. Facebook is one of many hundreds of social networking sites in existence. There have also been some dangerous sites popping up such as ChatRoulette , an anonymous webcam chat site, and formspring.me , an anonymous site where users ask questions of each other.

There are always going to be new sites popping up that may be more dangerous than the other. However, the behavior we want our kids to portray is one of responsibility. We do need to teach our kids about them, but also teach them the consequences of negative action.

 When you teach your children about privacy and the importance of thinking carefully before posting anything to the internet; when they understand that anything posted to the internet lasts forever; when they understand the consequences of bullying; when they understand that real friends are only those around them and not just on the internet, we make good progress in equipping our children to be SAFE Cyber Citizens.