How to help your child Protect Online reputation

Just like one’s reputation in the real world, everyone (who has an online presence) has an online or virtual reputation as well. And the way a person does every possible thing to maintain a better reputation in the real world, one need to put special efforts to create a real good reputation online

Sadly, most teenagers don’t understand this crucial factor while socializing online or while creating their profiles and pages across the various social sites.

Below are the factors that need to be checked for creating a better online reputation or protecting it if it is already in danger.

1 Let your Child Know who shouldn’t be his Friend

Friends kind of give an identity to your child. Remember when you yourself were a child how your teacher would make you sit with a silent or studious kid in the class every time you did anything naughty or your grades went low. Well, things are just the same even today. Don’t you sometime make sure if your child isn’t going out with wrong type of crowd or befriending some outrageously mischievous teen around? So, you know it all and you already do it that way but the only thing is you don’t pay much attention to your child’s online friend circle.

Well it is equally important. If your child has some drug addict, alcoholic goon on the friend list or some awfully disgraceful young lady in the circle, it will surely popularize your child to be one like them.

2 Teach your child to Use Tools & Apps to Remove Damaging Bits Online

Make sure there isn’t anything awfully troublesome about your child’s reputation online. Say some picture, video, post, conversation, comments and so on. Ask your child to check what kind of things related to him can be found online, and if there are certain damaging things online simply get them removed as soon as possible. There are special tools available online that prove helpful in removing all the damaging things online. Another possible way is to contact with the site owners and ask them to remove any reputation damaging page or profile present there.

3 Let your child Know What Things shouldn’t be Shared Online

A simple rule is to ask your child to post things thinking that his school principal or future college dean or some future recruiter must be seeing them. A wrong post as a school goer can be damaging when applying for admission in college or can become a reason for the recruiter to reject your child from a job or position in the future. In fact, this is something that even the adults need to keep in mind as there have been several cases where a person was fired from a job just because of a wrong post or a comment about the person’s boss or company online.

4 Teach your Child how to Set the Privacy Settings

Make sure that your child knows this rule: “Let private things remain private.” No private information should be shared online; it can sometimes be embarrassing and even futile. Of course, people can misuse private information, say your child’s break up becomes an online news; your child’s bad grades gets published on social sites or still bad – you fought with your spouse last night and now the whole world knows it because your child posted it on some social site! This will not only damage your child’s reputation but will be damaging for you and your entire family.

Apart from telling your child not to post personal and private things also teach him to set the privacy settings. Some sites offer special privacy settings which helps the user to keep personal information hidden from the world. Make sure your child knows how to use these settings and he really uses them.

5 Parental Monitor cell phone and Internet Usage of your Child