The internet is a very powerful tool that is required for modern living, but it has a dangerous dark side, which cannot help build christian lives. I have provided internet access for my family to work, study, communicate, and conduct business from home. This is great but, I want to protect us from the dangers on the internet, which will grieve our righteous souls (2 Peter 2:8).
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. (1 John 2:15-16)
I am afraid of standing before the judgment seat of Christ without taking necessary steps to bring up my children in the training and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). Therefore, I have implemented the following layers of protection for our home…
- The Bible teaches how to be a godly husband
- 3 secrets for raising successful children: nurture, admonition, without wrath
First layer (Free): configure the router to use Open DNS (Family Shield), which blocks…
- Adult websites that are unsuitable for kids (or christian adults)
- Proxy and anonymizer sites commonly used by savvy kids to bypass traditional Web filters
- Phishing sites that aim to trick you into handing over personal or financial information
- Some virus-spreading malware websites
Second layer ($35): Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole DNS software
- The Pi-hole® is a DNS sinkhole that protects your devices from unwanted content, without installing any client-side software.
Third layer ($130/year): VPN (virtual private network) for protection from snooping and malware…
- Parental control and internet safety solution that helps parents protect their children and monitor their Internet use, filter website content, monitor Facebook, set time controls, block inappropriate games, and much more
If you are really concerned about the dangers of the Internet to yourself, your family, and your children, then the several hundred dollars per year that this setup costs is very minimal. But, if you cannot afford even this much money, please at least consider configuring your router to use Open DNS (Family Shield), which is free and very easy to do.
I don’t claim these are the best or only solutions, because there are many similar products with lots of pros and cons, but I am just describing what I have done for the protection of my family.
I’d like to introduce our Digital Citizenship Guide for Parents. This guide will help parents to raise children in a digital age and make them good digital citizens. It describes why digital literacy is so important for kids and what parents should do to reduce the possible risks as at each stage of growth, the risks may be more imminent or less so. To help parents better guide through which age dangers are more present, we divided kids into 4 groups:
The guide can be found here: https://infotracer.com/resources/digital-citizenship-guide-for-parents
Here are some websites that have already used our resource:
http://burlingtonnc.gov/1916/Student-and-School-Safety
https://icha.idaho.gov/menus/resources.asp
https://www.internet4classrooms.com/links_grades_kindergarten_12/parents_internet_safety.htm
Hello there ,
I saw that you mentioned netnanny.com and I wanted to share my gratitude concerning your work on promoting online child safety.
I want to suggest you share an important guide which came out last week. I found it was very thorough on child safety online:
https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/the-ultimate-parent-guide-for-child-internet/
I liked the way they summarized each section with actionable items for the parent/teacher.
Once again, thanks for helping protect our kids,
Rebeca