ABA Family Legal Guide

Computer Law

Child Protection and the Internet

Are there stronger steps parents can take?

Most ISPs have parental permission restrictions if you want to set them up, as do some browsers, such as Internet Explorer.

If more aggressive monitoring is in order, the FBI recommends that parents should maintain access to their child's online account and randomly check his or her e-mail. In addition, parents should ask what safeguards are being used on computers at the public library and at friends' homes.

Parents have warned their children for generations to "Beware of strangers," and this should be extended to people that children encounter online. Parents should instruct their children never to meet with a person they have met online or to post pictures of themselves on the Internet or in an online message to people they do not know. Children also should be told never to disclose their name, address, or telephone number online or respond to suggestive, obscene, belligerent, or harassing online messages.

Parental oversight will be difficult to enforce outside the home. However, parents have been waging the same battle for years with regard to their children's television viewing at friends' houses.