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Advice

The internet is great for helping your children with their homework, but because anyone can publish anything on the internet, and often nobody will check things before they get published, you need to teach your children that not all websites are reliable sources of information.

Search websites (or search engines as they are called) like Google, or Yahoo! can help you find what you are looking for. Children will love to search the internet but from time to time they may see or read things which may be unsuitable, upsetting or even in rare cases illegal.

Even entering very innocent words into a normal search engine can give you a list of unsuitable websites, so if you see your child looking at a dodgy site, don’t jump to the conclusion that they deliberately went there, it could easily have been by mistake. The Tools section will give you some ideas on how to make searching easier and safer for your family.

It's not just web pages which have unsuitable writing or images on them, sometimes emails can be sent to you which you didn’t request. This is called spam or junk mail, and there is a lot of it on the internet. Some of these emails may contain pictures along with links to pornography websites or other places where you don’t want your children to be. It’s important to teach your children not to reply to these emails and delete them straight away. There is more information in the Info Centre on how to deal with spam.