How to Protect Your Kids from Porn

You might enjoy perusing adult entertainment online on your personal computer. Much to your chagrin if you are a parent, so too might your young child. Most parents want to protect their children from exposure to porn, and there are several steps you can take to safeguard them.

Probably the best step you can take as a parent is to communicate with your kids about what is appropriate Web behavior. If you keep the lines of communication open with your children, they are much more likely to understand why you want them to stay out of certain sites on the computer and be willing to comply with your wishes.

Another step to take is to add filtering software to your home computer that your children will be using. After it is on your hard drive, if someone tries to type a word like "sex" into a search engine, the filtering software works so that no pornographic images or sites come up on the screen. However, there are some flaws with this system. If you have an older child that uses the Internet for research for school assignments, the filter will sometimes do too good a job of keeping information at bay. If you are researching first ladies, for example, and you type in "Onassis" with filtering software turned on, you will get nothing back from the search because the name Onassis contains the word "ass," which is a filtered-out word on the software. Filters can also be used to restrict e-mail access and can be set to lock children off the Internet at certain times that you cannot be immediately available to supervise their computer use.

Pornography is a form of freedom of speech, according to case results from the US Supreme Court, and therefore it is not kept off the Internet or out of stores. There is not a law that would limit porn so that children would not have access to it, because of the worldwide nature of the Internet. Just because a law might be passed to limit porn to minors, that might not be the case in another country, and the Internet offers access to all. Filtering software is the Supreme Court's answer to this issue, and it is up to parents to install it and activate it.