Many parents make the mistake of believing they won't have to do much to ensure mobile and Internet child safety until their kids are into their teen years, or at the very least eleven or twelve years old. Unfortunately, kids are getting online at earlier ages, which means their safety is at risk at an ealier age than most parents realize.

In a recent article in The Jackson Sun, experts discuss the need for "tech talks". Parents already understand the need to talk to their kids about sex, drugs and alcohol. Discussions about technology have to be added to that list. The progression of technology demands it, and so do those who are building tech devices for kids at younger and younger ages every year. That means parents need to use"digital training wheels" even earlier than they did a few years ago.

Our latest guest post comes from Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, New York Institute of Technology.  Here, Dr. Dong discusses how parents can help teens get smart and stay safe on smartphones, even if the parents themselves are a little in the dark when it comes to the technology. 

Our latest guest post for Internet Safety Month comes from Judge Tom Jacobs, the founder of AsktheJudge, an educational website for teenagers and the laws that affect them.  Here is his take on a big issue affecting teenagers both legally and socially today: sexting. 

As you know, it only takes a few seconds to pull up your shirt or drop your pants, snap a picture and send it to a love interest. Regardless of your reason for sexting, think twice before actually doing it. It’s an act that may change, or even end, your life.

Your state may have a sexting law. You may or may not know about it or what it says. If you Google the name of your state and “sexting laws” you can read about the consequences for sexting someone. The fact that your state doesn’t have such a law isn’t a green light for you to go ahead and send a sext message or photo to even your closest friend. This is the Internet we’re dealing with. Every post or image has the potential to enter cyberspace and go viral. You can’t take it back once you hit “send” no matter how many times you go back to hit delete or trash.

Consider the case of 13-year-old Hope Witsell. It started out as flirting, but quickly turned into a nightmare. Hope was in middle school when she sent a topless photo of herself by text to a boy she liked. However, it was intercepted by a girl who had borrowed the boy’s cell phone. The girl forwarded the photo to friends and it spread to several schools.

With the advancements in technology these days, it almost seems as if parents can be everywhere at once. Indeed, digital parenting is completely possible with monitoring systems directed toward your child's cell phone and computer usage and their online, gaming and social networking history.

As a recent uKnowKids post pointed out, you can even add location monitoring to your child's smartphone that not only lets you know where they are throughout the day, but it also could mean the difference between survival and tragedy in the event of an abduction.

Certainly, the willingness to take proactive measures to protect your children doesn't make you a panicked and frightened person – it makes you a good parent. And although you don't want to dwell on the possibility of someone kidnapping your child, one of the toughest parts of the gig is addressing unthinkable events before they happen so that you are prepared if they ever do occur. That's why you teach your children about the dangers of strangers – not to instill a fear of those they don't know, but to equip them to function in the real world.

Foster children are especially vulnerable to various ID theft types, because their Social Security Number and other personal data is accessed by many so many people at various stages of the foster care process, the Huffington Post reports. This results in credit problems that often go unnoticed until the child reaches adulthood and tries to establish credit for him- or herself.

Our next guest blog post for Internet safety month comes from Ann Biddlecom, Senior Product Manager at Kaspersky Lab, one of the world's leading Internet security companies. Read on for her take on keeping your children safe on the computer.

View the SlideShare on our Internet Safety eBook. This is a short and sweet version of our full length eBook that you can download for free here. Learn why summer can be a dangerous time for kids to be on the Internet for lenghty amounts of time, the importance of technology in their lives, how to strike a balance and much more!

With summer vacation just around the corner, kids have much more free time on their hands for social networking than they did during the school year. With that absence of face-to-face contact and communication that kids are normally exposed to during school hours, cyberbullies are provided a “protective shield” from real-life consequences. Hiding behind the safety of a keyboard, bullies feel invulnerable to any possible negative repercussions of their behavior, making them far more vicious in their attacks. Consider the following few tips on keeping your kids safe from cyberbullying this summer vacation, when decidedly taking preventative measures, or if your child falls prey to one's attacks. Be sure to instruct your children on the proper procedures to execute if they encounter online harassment.

Don't Fight Fire With Fire

You know kids.  They live, breathe, eat, sleep and play in a digital world. There's no denying this fact and there's no going back.

You may long for a time when families sat around the dinner table and talked to each other.  You may wish for more face time, actual conversations, even if it is with a telephone.  However, our plug-and-play digital society is entrenched and intrusive. This is where Digital Parenting comes in.

So, how does Digital Parenting work?  First, establishing boundaries is key.  Your kids, and most likely you, are attached to your cell phone and mobile communications device.  It is the way of today's world. You can practice examples that will help make you an accomplished Digital Parenting professional.

First example: Kids mimic what their parents do and say.  If you are on the cell phone while driving with your child, they determine this to be normal behavior.  If you are texting with a friend, co-worker or family member during a conversation, they also see this as acceptable.

Remember when we told you about the new study done by McAfee concerning children, parents and the online disconnect?

As part of Internet Safety month, we are proud to say that we got Robert Siciliano, an online security expert at McAfee to comment on the study's findings. Read his guest post for uKnowKids below.

Parents: Do You Know What Your Tween Is Up Too?  

In McAfee’s 2013 study “Digital Deception: Exploring the Online Disconnect between Parents and Kids” that examines the online habits and interests of preteens, teens, and young adults and finds there is a significant disconnect between what they do online and what their parents believe they do.

While youth understand the Internet is dangerous, they still engage in risky behavior, hiding this activity from their parents in a variety of ways, and acknowledging that they (46%) would change their behavior if they knew their parents were paying attention.

The social network training wheels parents provided for Facebook are beginning to shift to something new now that teenagers are moving more exclusively to other social network sites like Twitter. With adults seeming to be taking over Facebook and the endless battles over privacy issues, can teens really find more peace, tranquility and safety over at Twitter? According to a Pew Report, kids were finding better methods of expression on Twitter (and Instagram) than Facebook has ever provided.

Parents, do you love to snap pictures of your children on your smart phone and then upload them for family and friends to see? What if I told you that this practice could make it very easy for predators and bad guys to see where your children were located, even down to the exact spot of their bedroom? Might freak you out, right? 

Whether we like it or not, we all know that tweeners are more active on social media now than ever.

Take a look down any hallway in a middle-school, and you will see kids everywhere hiding their smart phones in their lockers and bags to make a quick text or social media update.

We don't need to review the consequences and dangers of children being online unattended.  We see stories about it each night on prime time TV. Horrific stories of children being abducted and held in the custody of demented strangers. 

uKnowKids has released our first educational piece of content for Internet Safety Month! Our newest eBook is entitled "Internet Safety and Strategies for the Lazy Days of Summer."

For as long as children have spent summers away from school, parents have struggled to keep them occupied and out of trouble. With new technologies being developed seemingly at the speed of light, fewer parents have to worry about their kids getting bored over long, hot summers. But this doesn't mean you can leave them to their own devices on those devices. Download this eBook and learn about some of the most prevalent digital dangers during the summer and how to prepare and protect your children from them.

You will learn: 

• Why some technical threats are more common in the summer

• The role of technology for kids in the summer

Our friends at Tech Cocktail did a phenomenal job of covering a difficult topic: parental monitoring and intelligence.  Here is what they had to say about our service.

Protect your tweens and teens from unwanted digital behavior with uKnowKids. 

Too much of something can be a bad thing. Like ice cream (especially for the lactose intolerant), or child digital monitoring services for parents. Used the right way, it can keep kids safe and give parents useful insight. Used the wrong way, and it is just a really sophisticated spy shop grown-up toy.

Did you know Congress has declared June as National Internet safety month? While we believe every month should be Internet safety month, we are excited about the awareness that this will hopefully cause! Because of this, we are running a contest throught the month of June where you can enter to win a year-long free Premier uKnowKids account featuring enhanced social, mobile and location monitoring valued at $120. All you have to do is enter and you will have a chance to win one of 10 prizes! No purchase necessary! 

Social networking sites are a popular way for children and teenagers to keep in touch with each other and stay updated with what is going on in their lives. Facebook is currently the most popular site by far, and the process of updating your own status, and looking at other users' information, can take up quite a bit of a child's time. Unfortunately, some kids are on the site far too often and for long durations of time, leading to what can be called "Facebook addiction". This can lead to slipping grades, disciplinary problems, and social anxiety.

Stepping in before Facebook addiction becomes a real problem can be done with sensible digital parenting and Parental Intelligence solutions, but it always helps to know what to look for in order to tell if your child is addicted to Facebook. These 5 signs should be taken very seriously and if they are present, you should be prepared to set rules and limits on Facebook usage.

1. Is your child constantly on Facebook?

A child being constantly on Facebook is a sure sign of Facebook addiction. If their time on the site can be summarized as "multiple hours a day", you should have a talk with your child and let them know that it can be potentially unhealthy to be on Facebook for so long every day. Facebook monitoring programs can help you determine how long they are on and what exactly they are doing on the site.

Crucial information about Snapchat and leaked photos from our friends at Phones Review.   

What a week it has been for Snapchat leaked photos and users wanting to learn how to take a screenshot within the Snapchat app, which is a real-time chatting app on both Android and iPhone. The other reason this news has hit the headlines for most majorly news outlets is thanks to the kind of sexting photos appearing on services like Snapchat Leaked.

Snapchat leaked photos and websites – two websites hitting the headlines this week include Facebook and a website called Snapchat Leaked. While some of the Android and iPhone owners using Snapchat might have thought every photo they took would be safe, it seems that a Facebook page and website called Snapchat Leaked has been posting these pictures after taking screenshots that users first thought was impossible.

The Snapchat Leaked Facebook page was removed within the past 24 hours, although Google still has a cache of that Facebook page, and the website Snapchat Leaked seems to have gone as well with some dodgy looking redirects now in place.

Parents and teachers are forced to long for those days when bullying mostly ended up with school authorities suspending the bully and calling in parents of both parties. Schools do boast of counseling sessions and preventive measures to stop bullying but the offense has taken a new form which is making it more and more difficult for both educators and parents to control. As the only exercise for more and more teens is flexing their fingers on the keyboard of their computer or phone, their cyberbullying, at some point or the other, does step into their virtual lives. The main problem is that traditional bullying was more visible than cyberbullying. It happened mostly on school premises and even if it didn’t, there was always some proof of harassment or some kind of supervision that could put a stop to the act. In its most dangerous form known as cyberbullying, the mere detection of the problem is very difficult. Prevention and long-term effects are even more unmanageable.   

Justin Patchin, an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Co-Director of Cyberbullying Research Center, spoke in an interview about how cyberbullying has teachers baffled as to what role they can play in stopping it. It has managed to give teachers more to worry about than just the falling grades of their students. Recognizing it as more or less new phenomena, Patchin encourages school authorities to avoid keeping cyberbullying at the end of their priority list.