Digital media exert a tremendous fascination on children and young people. Protect your offspring from dangers by setting up parental controls and teaching media literacy.
Empowering children to use digital media confidently is an educational task that parents must face today. Technical solutions help them shield children from dangerous content, depending on their age. These tips have proven helpful:
- It is best to set up separate user accounts for children on the devices. These should not have full access, for example, to the control panel or the installation of software. For the protection programs under Windows and on the Mac, the existence of a separate account is mandatory.
- When offspring get their first device of their own, take time to set it up. For tablets, for example, you can often store the age of the user. Based on this, some content will then be filtered automatically. Remember that you are liable for things children do on the Internet. For this reason alone, it is advisable to keep a close eye on online activities.
- Set up parental controls. The market offers various software that parents can use to keep an eye on and restrict their children's media use. For Windows and macOS, you can set up parental controls directly in the operating system.
- While you should completely prevent purchases and installations from the app and media stores for smaller children, you can make parental consent required for purchases for youngsters in the protection programs.
Basically, there is no patent remedy for this topic. Trust and the maturity of the children play an important role. The portals "Schau hin" (German only) and Klicksafe.de, for example, offer advice and assistance. Deutsche Telekom also offers free, easy-to-understand materials on many aspects of media literacy via "Teachtoday"," Scroller" or Teachtoday Academy.
