Tips for controlling your child's computer use

•   A good tool a child has for screening material found on the Internet is his or her brain. Teach children about exploitation, pornography, hate literature, excessive violence, and other issues that concern you so they know how to respond when they see this material.

• Examine your own online habits. Do you have trouble controlling your Internet use? Remember, you are your child's most important role model.

• Don't ban the Internet. It's an important part of most kids' social lives. Instead, establish family Internet rules about where your kids can go online and what they can do there - and stick to them. These rules might include: a limited amount of time online each day; no surfing or instant messaging until kids complete their homework; no chat rooms or online adult content. Children, being children, may struggle to keep to such verbal agreements, in which is it is essential to use software to keep control of how your child uses the computer (see below).

• Keep the computer out in the open. Set up your computer in a public area of your house, not in a child's bedroom.

• Suggest alternatives. If your children seem interested only in playing online video games, try an offline tie-in to one of their favorite games. For example, if your child enjoys fantasy role-playing games, encourage her or him to read fantasy books.

• Make use of the commercially available Internet filtering and parental control software programs. These programs are vital in the vast majority of cases in which children are unlikely to regularly stick to verbal agreements about computer and Internet use. Such software packages can, for example, block sites by name, search for unacceptable words and block access to sites containing those words, block entire categories of material, and prevent children from giving out personal information.

• Use these same packages to monitor your children when they're online and monitor the time they spend online.