How to Block Adult Sites

One of the tricks with preventing your child from seeing adult content is that the adult sites only ask that they click on a link in order to verify their age. And while this might be great for you, this is not so great for your under 18 year olds. You need to step in to protect them from the sites they already know exist, but that you’d rather not think of them looking at…until you’re dead anyway. You can block these adult sites and help to keep your children innocent, at least at your own home.

Find Out What They’ve Seen

The first thing you need to do is the last thing you want to do – find out what your kids have already seen. All you need to do is to go to where your Internet’s history is stored and browse through the websites that are listed. However, this can be tricky as you yourself might have these deleted every day because of…work stuff that you’re looking at after the kids go to bed. Also, many kids know how to delete a browser’s history, so this isn’t necessarily the best way to find out what they have been going online. For younger children, however, this is still going to help you find out what you need to stop.

Learn the Privacy Controls

Next, you need to look at the browsers that your children use and check out the privacy controls. There are ways that you can stop your child from viewing certain sites or kinds of sites online, but you need to block them yourself. Make sure to block as much as possible and then secure the new settings with a strong password to ensure they can not be changed. You might also want to just put these settings on the computers that your children are allowed to use, as this will let you and others who are over the age of 18 surf the Web without any restrictions. You can also purchase privacy software that can help to protect children from images and text they should not be seeing.

Expose Their Surfing Habits

But the best way to make sure that your children can’t surf the Web for adult themed material is to put the family computer out in the open, where everyone can watch them. Sure, this isn’t going to be super convenient, but it’s more likely that your child is not going to look at those adult pictures if others are watching too. You might also want to lock down the computer at night with a tough password to ensure that your child is not able to get to these sites when you’re not around.

Blocking adult sites is something that you might want to do as a parent. And while it’s easy to do, some children are smart enough to get around the blocks. Whether this makes them a bad kid or just a smart kid, that’s up to you.