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Parental Control Software |
| Parental control software is a kind of software tool specially designed for your home computers which controls computer use, filters the Web content, and allows parents to ensure a safe online experience for their family.When picking out parental control software for your family, pay attention to the features discussed below. First and foremost, the program should be easy to set up and use. Second, the program should be protected with a password and impossible for knowledgeable children and teenagers to turn it off. It should filter or block anything that parents find inappropriate for a kid. Some software tools offer profanity masking - even in e-mails and instant messages - a proxy guard to keep your kid from visiting a proxy site to avert the parental controls, and social networking control programs to block or control your kid's behavior on the most popular websites, such as Facebook and MySpace. There are also parental controls that offer chat control. This feature is great for blocking improper words and reporting live chat conversations so that you know who your kid is chatting with and what they are chatting about when you are not monitoring.Other features that parents may find valuable include time limiting that allows you to establish a schedule for your kid's Web use to certain times of the day and reporting features that will give you a detailed report of all of the Internet activity on your PC. Some of the parental controls also have pre-set profiles grounded on age groups specially designed to make a very user-friendly set-up for computer-illiterate parents who want to shield their kids from some of the dangers arising out of using the Web. Some software programs allow parents to use the program on a network of up to three home computers. This feature is especially great, if you have a few computers at home or if your child has their own laptop.Even though the software programs have a lot in common and are designed to allow parents to monitor computer usage and filter the Internet content, they are different in features that may make one or another work better for your family or situation. For instance, some software tools really work well with social networking sites while some do not, so if your child has a profile on any of these websites, you will want to select a software tool that has those features. Each software program has something different to offer, so take the time to read each review thoroughly to decide which software program satisfies your needs best. |