How to Protect your Kids on the Internet

This post is very important, so please read. Our children are growing up differently than we did. The Internet provides all sorts of access to a world we didn’t know. This can be fantastic and wonderful but it can also be scary. This post is about how to protect your kids on the Internet and our latest discovery that works.

I’ve never shared this before but my husband works in Internet Security. Without going into detail about his past work experience, let’s just say my husband knows his stuff when it comes to this topic.

I once had a bad experience when my sweet, naive 5 year old daughter typed in “Disney Princesses” into a search engine and something very wrong popped up. It was an innocent search, I was in the room and I thought our content filtering worked. It failed me and I felt awful. There is evil out there and we as parents have to work overtime to protect our kids. I’ve felt horrible ever since – as if I failed her when really it was an innocent search and we had been doing everything we knew how to not let this happen. I asked for my husband’s help and this is his latest discovery.  I’m extremely impressed with the Circle with Disney to help with this.

Quick note – this is NOT a sponsored post. I write this as a Mother who loves and adores my children and wants to share this information with other parents or grandparents or care takers.

Chances are your children have iPads, or iPhones or a tablet for reading that still has Internet access. Or you have a family computer they do their homework on. And chances are you think you’ve enabled content filtering. But I can tell you from experience this filters very, very, very little. It’s not easy to know how to protect your kids on the Internet, but all of us want to.

Yesterday my husband bought and played with the new Circle with Disney. He was blown away by it and said “all of the parents who read your blog need to know about this.” I played with it, too and couldn’t agree more.

The Circle with Disney is an $81 device you will plug in by your router. Here’s what it does:

• You install the device once. You do NOT have to install it all the devices in your home (the phones, the tablets, the desktops, etc.) You plug it in once either by or into your router (your choice depending on your computer abilities – but my husband wants you to know it’s very intuitive and easy to know. It’s not hard he says.)
• You’ll open the app it comes with and it will automatically show you all of the devices in your house. Then you’ll choose which devices you want to monitor. In our case, we have one iPad our kids share and a desktop they use for homework. We activated those for monitoring.
• Content filtering — top notch. It’s blocking way more than our basic content filtering on our devices ever did. The content filtering with the Circle of Disney works the way it should.
• You can adjust the level of content filtering differently for each child in your home. So your five year old can have different access than say, you’re 13 year old.
• On top of that, you can easily see what websites they were on by opening the app and looking. So you know what they are searching and sites they are on.
• Time Limits – you can set time limits for each device. So if each of your kids is lucky enough to have their own cell phone or iPad, you can choose say 30 minutes of screen time for each device and then it will automatically shut the device off. No more monitoring each of them individually or them fooling you into how long they’ve actually been on it!
• Should they get “rewarded” and you give them another 30 minutes, you easily open the app and add this time to it.
• Bedtime can be pre-set so it won’t open before bedtime if they haven’t used their allowed time and you’re strict about no screens before bed.
• Here’s something crazier — do you have a child trying to sneak around this protection by inviting a friend over to look up things on the Internet during a sleepover? If your child brings over a friend whose carrying a device you will receive a notification on your app that they have entered your “Circle with Disney” and you can choose to monitor this device or not. Is it a bit big brother? Yes. But do I want my children sneaking and looking at bad things on the Internet when I have a chance to stop it? No. While you can’t control the world, you can control your own home and make it known Mommy and Daddy know what’s up! I will be 100% up front with the parents of all my friends children that I’m doing this and it’s for my children’s safety. My kids safety is paramount.
• The app sends you notifications when the time limit is up.

Listen. I’m not advocating big brother for everyone. But I am a mother to three children and am trying to raise them in a new world. I love the Internet but knowing how to protect your kids on the Internet will give all of us peace of mind that they are experiencing this amazing world of knowledge safely. I believe in letting them be little as long a they can. This Circle of Disney device has already made our house a) much safer  b) easier to manage the screens in our home  and c) made me sleep easier knowing they can’t see what I don’t want them to see.

I firmly believe every parent will love this and needs this no matter their kids ages. Any advancement towards knowing how to protect your kids on the Internet is an important one.

It’s $81 and you can buy it here. That’s the cheapest price in the world for peace of mind. I say order now. Even better to have it all set up IN ADVANCE in case Santa is bringing new toys.

A gigantic thank you to my husband for staying vigilant to help stay ahead of things best he can to protect our family.