Johannesburg, 16 Jul 2019
Credible studies have shown that on average, children from the age of 10 have smartphones. That same study shows that by 12, nearly 50% of these kids have social media accounts.
What this means in reality, is that your kids now have unfettered access to the Internet from an age where a vast majority of the content available on the Internet is not appropriate for their developing brains.
It also means their social development is hugely impacted by social media such as Facebook and Instagram. Kids are using these applications to measure themselves by. Self-esteem and validation is gained now by the amount of likes a post gets.
Kids with the most friends online or the most followers are considered the most popular. Developing brains are now looking at other kids' pictures and comparing their lives to these. Adults, for the most part, know that what people post about themselves is probably only one side of the story. Kids don’t; they see fun, party pictures posted by their peers and judge their lives by these. This has led to an increase in depression in teens and increased suicide rates.
So what do you as a parent do to protect your child? Do you take the drastic step of not allowing your kids access to social media or the Internet? You could, but that would lead to them falling behind in other key areas.
The LucidView solution
Manage your kids' Internet access. Don’t ban it, regulate it. How can you do this? Well, you can ask your service provider if they have a solution whereby you can manage when and for how long social media sites are accessible on your home network. Your service provider should be able to provide this to you. LucidView has developed the technology for service providers to do this.
However, if your service provider doesn’t offer this, using our step-by-step guide, you can build your own Internet management tool: the LucidView Enforcer. You do not need to be tech-savvy to build this, you simply need to follow the instructions on how to build a Standard Enforcer on www.lucidview.net
Features of the LucidView Enforcer
Once you create your Enforcer, you will be able to completely manage the Internet in your home. The Enforcer comes with a sophisticated content filter that already has millions of Web sites classified in our database, our Web crawlers are constantly collecting new sites analysing, classifying them and adding them to one of the categories available with the Enforcer.
You can then decide what categories to block. These include: explicit content, known risks (malware), untrustworthy connections (possible ransomware or malware), gambling, gaming and much, much more. You can also choose to allow access to certain categories such as Facebook for limited periods of time, thereby reducing the risk of your children spending dangerous amounts of time on these sites or being exposed to cyber bullying.
The LucidView Enforcer also provides detailed reporting on which device accessed which site (or attempted to) when and for how long, giving you insight into what your children are actually doing on the Web so you can decide whether they are accessing content that you don’t think is fit for them yet.
The LucidView Enforcer also provides protection against intrusion on your Internet and allows you to ensure all users get enough bandwidth for there needs even when the line is saturated.
The Enforcer allows you to enforce both Google Safe Search and YouTube Safe Search, ensuring your kids can only search for content deemed child-friendly by Google.
Most importantly, you can do this all at the gateway, where the Internet enters your house, and the LucidView Enforcer is very difficult to circumvent no matter how tech-savvy your kids are.
Yes, in this modern world of ours, children are very mobile and chances are your kid might have 3G Internet access on their phone. If your 3G service provider is not able to provide your kids with clean Internet services, which is something you should demand by the way, then simply minimise the amount of bandwidth your kid has access to on their phone by minimising the airtime they are given. Remember, it's not about blocking, it's about managing, and on the unmanaged phones, minimising.
Now you know that at home, you are in control. Limiting their mobile data so that they can only text will ensure the bulk of their browsing is done under your roof with your parenting policy.
LucidView offers a live demo of these features available as well as a 30-day free trial, which we encourage you take advantage of. Feel free to contact us via our Contact page if you require any further information or have any queries.
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