Parent's Guide to Online Gaming, Part 1

By Chad Mcdermott

The internet touches every aspect of your children's lives. Where you might look up an unknown word in a dictionary, your kids are more likely to use dictionary.com. Where you use the telephone, they use instant messenger. An even greater difference can be found in how they play games. Where the games of their parent's generation may have involved a board, cards, or at their most sophisticated a console system, the games your children play on the net can be far more complex. They mine gold, spread empires, fight dragons and aliens alone or with tens, hundreds, even thousands of their fellow gamers. All of this makes for a confusing mish mash of names, places, jargon and lingo that can leave you with no idea what your kids are actually doing and a vague feeling of uneasiness that some part of it might not be good for them.

Let us think for a moment what harm can the Internet do to the kids with no appropriate parental control. Inappropriate resources that are subject to parental control? Yes, including the obnoxious adult-oriented Web sites, but not limited to that. There are way too many harmful resources over the Internet that can confuse a young mind. Dangerous contacts? Certainly should be controlled by the concerned parents. The molesters out there are for real, and they can harm your kids even if they don't meet in person if no appropriate parental control measures are applied timely.

The simplest type of online game is the sort of Flash or Java driven game that you generally see running inside your web browser. This type of game tends to be relatively simple compared to the stand alone games discussed later. Common examples include Bejeweled, Zuma, and Diner Dash. These games are almost universally single player and have none of the sort of violent or mature content that keeps parents up at night. Were they movies, they would be G Rated, with perhaps the occasional game stretching to PG. If this is the type of game your kids are into then first, be relieved. Then, try the game out. Many of these games can be very enjoyable for even the most casual of players. Some, such as Bookworm, even have genuine educational content. These games can be as much an opportunity for bonding and learning as throwing around a baseball in the backyard, and have the added bonus of being much easier to get your kids to sit down with you and play.

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Control what your kids do online with appropriate parental control software. KGB Spy by http://www.refog.com/ lets you achieve desired levels of parental control simply and reliably. KGB Spy helps concerned parents restrict their children's access to dangerous resources and prevent inappropriate contacts by monitoring the kids' activities in real time and notifying parents if they are in danger. It is your and only your responsibility to watch the inexperienced children and stop them from getting in trouble.

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