When I was a kid I used to play with dolls. I also liked drawing with crayons and building whatever I imagined with my Lego set. Now children play with computers and start browsing the Internet even before they start going to school. It’s a fact: children feel a natural attraction to computers.
As the number of young PC users grows, so does the amount of software specially designed to rule the ever problematic kid-PC relationship. While it’s a good thing to let them familiarize with the machines they’ll surely end up using someday as grown-ups, you should certainly control their PC usage, not only for the kids’ safety, but also for the PC itself.
First, forget the idea that videogames are evil. There are good PC games for kids, most of them with an educational purpose so that children can learn something useful while they’re having fun. You can find games like these at Softonic: Math Ninja to practice with numbers, Bookworm Adventure to improve your spelling skill, Tux Typing to learn to type or even a diverse game pack like SmarterKid, to mention but a few. Also, if the children just want to have fun, try games like Lego Digital Designer, Childsplay or any of our digital coloring books.
Second, allowing your kids to surf the web is fine, but you should always be aware of their online activities. Web surfing can provide your children with endless fun and lots of stuff to learn but you certainly don’t want them to visit inappropriate web pages. Be sure to check our Security category to choose the application that better suits your needs, and don’t forget to read Nick’s article on children’s online safety. It’s also advisable to control the time they spend in front of the computer, which you can do with software like Kids PC time.
Finally, your PC also needs to be protected. Kids are always eager to learn and won’t hesitate to press every key and click on every button, so it’s definitely better to be safe than sorry. Softonic offers a wide range of applications to protect your computer by creating users with different privileges or blocking access to certain system areas, such as the Control Panel or the Windows Registry. One of them is Crawler Parental Control, but you may as well use any other that you prefer.
