Today’s kids are taking to the Internet like never before. Teens, pre-teens, and younger are blogging, bookmarking, IM-ing (instant messaging) their friends at a feverish pace. They’re personalizing their MySpace, Friendster, FaceBook and other favorite social networking space with photos, videos and personal information that helps them express their own special uniqueness. Plus, these services encourage and continue to provide more and more different ways for young people to communicate with one another. Although this can be a great way for kids to express their emotions, it also makes our children vulnerable to the online predators that frequent these sites.

So what’s a parent to do? Here are several ways you can help your kids use social networking websites more safely.

• Set your own house Internet rules. As soon as your children begin to use the Internet on their own, it is a good idea to come up with a list of rules that you all can all agree on. These rules should include whether your children can use social networking Web sites and how they can use them. For more information on setting rules, see Using family contracts to help protect your kids online.
• Make sure your children respect site age limits. The recommended age for most social networking sites is usually 13 and over so if your child(ren) is not the recommended age, don’t let them use the sites. Don’t rely on the sites to keep your young child from signing up.
• Evaluate the site(s) for yourself. Check out the site that your child wants to use and read the fine print. Find out if the site monitors what people post on their pages. Review your child’s page regularly and, just as important, review the pages of your child’s friends. You need to know that they are not posting content that compromised your child’s safety.
• Make sure your children only interact with people they’ve already met off-line, in person, and other no circumstances should they arrange to meet someone they’ve met only online. These sites are wonderful places to chat with friends, but can be a real danger when it comes to predatory strangers. It’s not enough to tell your children not to talk to strangers, because they might not consider someone they’ve “met” online to be a stranger.
• Insist they don’t use full names. Your children should use either their first names or a nickname, but make sure the nickname is not one that might attract the wrong kind of attention. Also, make sure your children do not use the full names of their friends, and vice versa.
• Be careful of easily traced information. Social networking sites encourage the joining of groups. Verify that your child’s profile does not contain publicly available information easily traced to a town, school or other identifiable location. For the same reason, you need to be careful about details in photographs. Understand that photos can reveal a lot so your children should not post photographs of themselves or their friends with easily traced details such as street signs, license plates on their cars, or the name of their school on their sweatshirts.
• Privately secure your child’s site. In many cases you can password-protect their section or use other ways to limit visitors to only people your child knows.
• Explain the danger of expressing emotions to strangers through poems, journals or any other means. Your children need to be aware that these words can be read by anyone with Internet access and that predators often search out emotionally vulnerable kids.
• Talk to your children about their online experiences. Encourage them to open up if something has made them feel uncomfortable. Remind them that you love them, you want to protect them, and they are not in trouble for bringing something to your attention.
• Remove your child’s page if they don’t follow the rules. If your children don’t comply, contact the service your child uses and ask them to remove the page. You may also want to look into Internet-filtering tools to assist (not replace) parental supervision.