Protecting Your Home from Porn – Part 2
The Internet is a great place to learn, but it’s also a potential danger – especially for children! Pornography is just a click or two away. Children need protection and guidance for going online. Dan Wilson continues his talk about how parents can protect their family when using Internet-enabled devices while outside the home.
Read Dan’s blog on this: Protecting Your Home from Porn – Part 2.
In my previous video, I laid out a plan to protect your family’s home Wi-Fi network. Now let’s think about protecting our kids when they leave our home or access their data plans.
There’s a great way to eliminate temptation for your kids to use their phone for sexual sin: give them a basic phone. Do they really need a handheld device smarter than the technology that sent Apollo 11 to the moon, especially when an unfiltered device can connect to porn in seconds? We know brave teens, though, who have asked their parents to let them trade in their smartphone for a dumb phone because they’re tired of being tempted by pornography. But if your older teen must have a smartphone, here are four crucial steps to protect them.
Number one: install filters and accountability software. Buy a filtering and accountability software app that can be installed on each internet-enabled device. Most of the Harvest USA staff favor Covenant Eyes. I use Mobicip for my accountability because it does a great job with Google image searches. There’s also Net Nanny, Safe Eyes, K9, X3watch. These programs work by switching off the native search engine, that is, the browser built into your phone, and replacing it with its own proprietary filtered browser.
Number two: disable the downloading of apps. Today, most apps can independently access the internet without using a smartphone’s native search engine. If you install a filter and accountability app but don’t disallow the adding of new apps, your child can load an app that works around the filter and accountability app and can access porn and other dangerous apps. Go into the settings of your child’s smartphone or tablet and disable the downloading of apps, so they can’t add apps on their own. The parental settings, including disabling the downloading of apps, should be passcode protected. That way, when your kid wants to load a new app, they have to come to you and have a conversation about it.
Number three: research and dialogue about devices, apps, and media. Don’t take your kid’s word on how appropriate an app, an artist, or a movie is. Research. Ask Google, “Is [blank] safe for kids? Can [blank] app be used to access porn?” We recommend commonsensemedia.org and pluggedin.com. All this research facilitates a running tech dialogue with your kids.
Number four: test your in-home and outside-the-home protection plans. You won’t be doing anybody any favors by failing to test your protection systems. You may find yourself on a site you don’t want to see, so do your checking with a spouse or another Christian friend. Check all devices, because nothing is foolproof.
And after being as faithful and savvy as we can be to protect our kids, remember, we can trust the Redeemer with our kids. He loves them more than we do. And our kids’ ultimate hope in struggling through this sexually broken culture is Christ’s amazing love and almighty power.
