Setting Up a Family E-mail Address
E-mail is a great way for children to communicate with friends and family, but letting your kids send and receive e-mail unsupervised may not be a good idea. Spam (junk e-mail) can expose your children to language or images that are not appropriate for kids, or open the door to viruses, spyware, or other unwanted software that could damage your computer.
Set up a family e-mail address or know your kids' passwords
One way to monitor your young children's e-mail communication is to maintain a family e-mail address that you and your children share. Another option is to establish a separate e-mail address for your kids, but make sure you know the password so you can regularly monitor your children's incoming and outgoing e-mail messages. Some parents log on and check their children's in-box before allowing the kids to read their e-mail, so they can delete any unwanted or potentially harmful messages.
Get extra e-mail accounts from your ISP or free Web-based services
You can do create a family e-mail address or a separate e-mail address for your kids through your Internet service provider (ISP), or by setting up free Web-based e-mail accounts.
Many ISPs, such as MSN, AOL, EarthLink, or local ISPs, allow customers to establish secondary e-mail addresses for family members or for the entire family to share. Procedures for setting up these accounts vary by company, so check with your ISP for specific advice.
There are also companies that offer free Web-based e-mail accounts that you and your children can use. The leading free e-mail services include Hotmail from Microsoft, Yahoo Mail from Yahoo, AIM Mail from AOL, and Gmail from Google. These companies allow you to set up as many e-mail accounts as you need.
Communicate with your children
While these methods enable you to see your children's incoming and outgoing e-mail messages after the fact, in most cases they do not allow you to preview messages before they are sent or received.
Also, keep in mind that your kids can set up and use their own free e-mail accounts anywhere they find an Internet connection, such as a friend's house, their school, a library, an Internet cafe, or other locations. Web-based e-mail services from companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Google ask new users for a birth date and, by federal law, require parental permission if the date of birth shows that a child is under 13. The services do not require proof of age, however, so if children enter an incorrect birth date they can establish their own e-mail accounts without their parents' knowledge.
It's important to help keep your children safe online by talking to them about the risks involved with e-mail and other online services, and to make sure they understand the importance of following family rules about when and how they use the Internet.
