There are a variety of reasons why you might want to block a website from your children’s view. Some categories of sites – such as adult sites – should be blocked as a matter of course. You obviously don’t want your children going to porn sites.
However, you may find that you want to block other sites as well. For example, you may decide you don’t want your child accessing social networking sites…or you might just wish to block them from one site due to problems on that particular site. Or you may want to block sites temporarily as, say, a punishment.
If you have a newer operating system, such as Windows Vista, you can use Parental Controls (in Vista this is located under Start/Control Panel/User Accounts and Family Safety) to block websites by site or by content. These controls also allow you to restrict how many hours your children can be on the computer, what games they can play and what programs they can run. Should you desire, you can even generate reports on their online activities.
Commercial Internet filtering software can also be used to block websites, keywords, and types of access (e.g. blocking chat rooms or P2P networks) from your children’s computer. In fact, if your family shares a computer, you can create varying levels of access, allowing the adults one level of access, teens another, and younger children yet another level of access. A few of the better filtering programs are WebWatcher and Spector Pro among others.
