According to Debbie Gordon, online safety expert, the main help of a parent, when referring to his/her child education, is the common sense. This is also applicable for the moment when children discover the Internet.

Gordon warns that the sentence 'Well, I know about Facebook so I am OK' shouldn’t become a motto among parents. Instead, they should take good care and pay attention if, along with being the best at work, at home and with the children, they try to gain the status of cyber parent.

She offers some advices for properly managing the situation: start talking to other parents and don’t be ashamed to ask for help. It may also help hiring a teenager or renting video games as an alternative.

Yet, the first step to take, before you find yourself in the position of an overwhelmed parent, is having a talk with the children regarding the Internet “problem”. If you surf online along your kid and establish from the beginning some firm rules, you won’t have much trouble. Also, try to put the computer in a place where you can supervise the activity.

Besides being a managing director of Mediacs, a media and cyber literacy promoting organization in schools, she also has a digital column on Sympatico/MSN, answering questions regarding the digital world, and collaborates with publications like Today's Parent and Owl. Gordon considers that being a parent nowadays is a more difficult job than parents had before.  

She advises parents not to be afraid to impose boundaries even if the children don’t like because "We want to give them those opportunities and we don't want to give them angst in the home", but they also should know about cyberbullying and that they have rules referring to chat rooms and meeting people on the Internet.

A main concern is that children could give the personal details on sites, could download viruses during the file sharing or discovering that the sites they visit are traced by companies with a cookie on their Internet browser. For visiting only the appropriate sites, especially for the young children, is needed the parental control software.

The same opinion has Ted Vine, principal at Jack Miner Senior Public School in Scarborough: they have the aptitude to surf the Internet, but they can’t make a clear distinction between the “good” and the “bad” sites. For this reason the parental supervision is mandatory.

Lynn Hargrove, director of consumer solutions of antivirus maker Symantec Canada Corp., declared that parents should start using the parental control software and other layers of protection because "It's parents' responsibility to make sure their PC is safe right from the get-go that their child is using".
Working at the company that made the Norton360 AntiVirus software product, he counsels parents to make sure that there is protection, security in place if the kids desire to buy something online.

Both patents and children mustn’t ignore the increasingly online criminality and that the identity theft should be taken into account because the personal information given by mistake by your kid can transform you in a victim.