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Readers' comments on any of these resources are alsways welcome! Do email us via feedback@netfamilynews.org.Detective Williams's Tip No. 4 - 'Don't let your kids have your master screen name.'
"This may seem a little obvious, but in these days of kids wearing the family Chief Technology Officer hat, a lot of parents have less control than their kids over Net use in their homes," writes Det. Bob Williams.
"With the big Internet service providers (AOL, MSN, EarthLink) that many families go with because of their user-friendly parental controls, there are two types of screen names: the master screen name of the account holder and the sub- screen names your kids get. The master screen name is the "key to the Internet kingdom" at anybody's house, and parents need to have exclusive use of that key (and any password associated with it) to prevent children from changing parental controls or preventing parents' access.
"After an Internet safety presentation I gave at a PTA meeting one night, a parent came up and told me she had brought a new computer home, handed her 12- year-old son the credit card, and told him to open an account with a popular ISP. The young man gladly did what he was told and obtained the master screen name. His parents were unable to set parental controls for their son until they got around to doing their own exploring with the account set-up information, and figured out what the child did. She told me she was glad she attended the presentation! She was going directly home to change the master screen and set the parental controls for her son."
Det. Bob Williams is a father of two high school students and Youth Officer in the Greenwich, Conn., Police Departmen. You'll find other parts of this series here.
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