Protect Your Children Online with Microsoft Family Safety Tools

With the proliferation of porn on the internet, it is becoming harder to protect children from obscene content and online predators. While the Web allows kids the freedom to make friends, play games and research homework with the click of a button, it can also pose a potential danger!

If you do a simple search in Google for something even un-related to porn, you will yield a number of un-filtered content. How do you protect your kids? You could buy filtering software like, CyberPatrol or Net Nanny, for about $40, some filtering software can cost up to $99. Microsoft developed a free tool called, Windows Live Family Safety, as part of their Windows Live Essentials Suite.

Windows Live Family Safety can filter and help you monitor your kids’ computer activity. It also gives you the ability to choose websites, games, and programs they can access and set time periods when they can use the computer.

Safe Search

Safe Search is locked on for Bing, Google, Yahoo! and other popular search engines. You can add your kid’s to the Family Safety website. For parents who are ready to give older kids a bit more responsibility, Safe Search has a setting that allows all websites, but lets you know if your child went to potentially inappropriate ones.

Monitor activities easily

Easily review your kids’ online activities so you can teach them to use the Internet responsibly. Parents who want more control can use Family Safety to block inappropriate content or even limit kids to age-appropriate sites. You can also limit your kids’ email and instant messaging access to approved contacts on Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger, so that you’ll always know where your kids are hanging out online and who they might be talking to.

Works great with Windows

Family Safety enhances the standard Parental Controls in Windows, adding remote management that can be use to change your child’s permissions online. Get session and website visit reports right from the Family Safety website—you don’t have to log on to your child’s PC. When installed on multiple PCs in the household, Family Safety enforces the same settings and combines reports from all PCs into one.

Setup is a breeze

If you have a Hotmail account (Windows Live ID), you’re almost half way there. Windows Live IDs are not required for children. Just download the software, install it, then follow a few easy steps to get started, and then choose settings for each child’s web access.

As parents, we are entrusted with our kids from God.  It is our responsibility to keep them safe. We cannot be at all places at all time, but we can prevent obscene content from entering our homes. The best layer of protection is the Word of God. Teach them the truth of the Bible and teach them it’s life saving principles.

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. ~ Deuteronomy 6:6-9