First off, let us create a scenario, you've planned your annual family vacation, but this time it's a part family vacation, because your now 17 year old teenager Paul has decided he'd rather stay home alone, naturally this caused you sleepless nights and lots of meditation before you finally realised hey our son is approaching adult hood let's give him some leeway! But of course there has to be set ground rules. These rules allow for no parties no strangers no risks "right" (wrong).

Hazard or no hazard?

You might think that your teenager is safe. You thought of everything he might need to endure on his own while you are on that one week dream vacation you have waited for so long. Your left thinking you are the best parent in the world. You even reminded him that he is not to let strangers in the house. What you did not count on was the computer sitting on your son's desk in his bedroom

With a few clicks your teenager can access any site if you don't take measures as a parent to police certain 'bad sites'. What happens if you teenager lands on a mature website? Your child can view images that are damaging to his young psyche.

When we think about protecting our teens we usually never think about that laptop sitting in our bedrooms perhaps. Or that computer you just bought Jennifer to do her school projects and research. But did you know your child is at hazard if he or she is not monitored while they surf on the world wide web?

Social media sites, chat rooms, explicit websites are a danger to our teens period. Anyone with any false ID can register and enter chat rooms, sign up for Facebook accounts. Whilst social media is considered a captivation in the context of communication, it has also been well publicised for the cause of teenage rape, teenage suicide, self harming, child bullying and the list goes on and on.

What to do?

The first step to take as a parent is to converse with your teenager about the known hazards from information exchanging while participating in conversations on chat rooms, social media websites. It is a good idea to always place a computer where you can monitor it visually from time to time or you can take covert steps and monitor your children's online activities with the use of a secret and invisible computer keylogger. The use of the keylogger would give you instant virtual eyes and let you see your children virtual character as well as the way they surf the net.

It's essential to protect our children from both real life hazards and online dangers. ourselves could assist in keeping our children safe and sound from both by talking with them at a very early age of these dangers. After all, technology pushes us more and more to use the web.