Parental control tools to protect your family

For parents of young children, it's disturbing to think how easy it is to access inappropriate material on the internet. Not to mention how easy it is for children to fall for the ploys of internet predators. While nothing can ever beat good parenting, it stands to reason that busy parents cannot watch over their children every moment of every day. One answer to this dilemma is to employ the use of effective parental control software.

Parental control tools fall into several main categories - internet filtering software, key loggers, monitoring tools, and hard drive scanning and cleaning applications.

With internet filtering software, parents can control which websites their children can visit and what kind of content they can view. Some of the more powerful variations can also monitor and block chat rooms, newsgroups and emails deemed inappropriate by parents.

Unlike internet filters, key loggers and other monitoring tools are incapable of blocking access to specific internet addresses or sites with specific keywords, however they are capable of detecting where a user has visited, what they have seen and done, and what they have typed. This is done by logging keystrokes, taking screen captures etc.

The last type of parental control tool available at present is the hard drive scanning and cleaning software. These programs help clean up a computer's hard drives by targetting and locating inappropriate files such as pornography. Parental control software such as this is particularly useful as internet filters are not always infallible, and in situations where children may gain access to inappropriate files via portable media such as CD's and DVD's.