Gone are the days when you knew your child was safe because they were home with you. With social media, smartphones, tablets, laptops and wireless Internet everywhere, there is almost nowhere your child can hide if someone wants to bully them. The wonders of our modern age have opened up a whole new world for bullies and victims and the terrain is frightening and dangerous.

Check out this article and perspective from child and adolescent psychotherapist and parenting expert, Katie Hurley.

No one wants to judge another parent. Or a group of other parents, for that matter. No, the call to end judgment among parents has been loud and clear for quite some time now. You can lose days of your life reading posts and articles on this very topic, if you so choose.

All families are different. We all have our own challenges. We all face our own stressors.

True. True. And true, again.

Your child has likely started back to school, which means new pens, pencils, binders and textbooks, but it also means new opportunities for digital dangers and threats. Is your child prepared to handle the back to school battle of juggling technology and learning? Are they prepared to combat cyberbullying or sexting pressures? 

Kids are always collecting text messages, images, contacts, downloaded applications, check-ins and location histories. An Android device allows a parent to understand what the child is doing with their smart phone in just minutes. With an iPhone, parents review contacts and mobile images while also utilizing suites of family locator tools. But what about checking on the photo downloads and the issues that arise when kids visit photo sharing sites.

Parents Automatically Work to Protect Their Children

Almost like a knee-jerk reaction - parents have a heightened sense of protection of their kids. Its is natural for the emergent technologies to raise concerns, if not eyebrows.

The explosion of social media has led to the prevalent misuse of innocent social tools by predators. Today it seems almost inevitable that however small the chance might be -  your children or teenagers may have photos that will fall into the wrong hands.

The Today Show did a segment on sexting last week, and they couldn't have been more wrong. 

Read the full story below from our friends at Business Insider. 

Last Thursday, "The Today Show" featured a segment on the new and shocking discovery that teens use their phones to sext each other, even though they use their phones to do literally everything else. We first saw the segment on Slate.

"Today Show" host Matt Lauer tries to figure it all out: "So a teenage boy will be sitting in a classroom, there will be a teenage girl he's never even talked to, and he will pick up the phone and text her 'I wanna hook up or I wanna do this to you, are you willing?'" he asks in the segment.

uKnowKids was featured in Mashable in the article "Keep it Clean: 8 Tools to Block Porn and Sexting." uKnowKids can help parents prevent their children from sexting and the dangerous pitfalls that can come with it! Here is it, by Taylor Casti.

If Anthony Weiner has taught us anything, it's that sometimes naughty pics just aren't worth it.

Sexting and pornography can be a problem for parents with teens. For teenagers and preteens, sexting can have major consequences, the least of which being a bad reputation. Nude selfies are still considered child pornography and are against the law. Even if the photo never makes it into the wrong hands, one study shows that teens who engage in sexting are more likely to take bigger sexual risks (such as having sex) that could lead to sexually transmitted diseases or teen pregnancy.

Parental involvement has been shown to have positive influences on a child’s academic and social development. As kids get older, they naturally want to gain independence and trust. When parents are controlling, kids may question if their parents trust them and parents might feel like they’re intruding. On the other hand, the job of a parent is to safe-guard in a reasonable and responsible way, leading both by example and by setting firm guidelines.

Set boundaries

The month of July brings you another eBook, and this one is for any parent whose child has asked to start their own, or any parent who wants to understand the basics and not-so-basics of blogging!

While there is undoubtedly a lot of potential for finding knowledge and quickly assembling research via the Internet, kids that use search engines and social networks for school and pleasure can end up facing significant dangers. 

The world wide web can be a big, scary place for your kids.The most efficient way to monitor your child's online activity is through a parental intelligence system that will monitor and analyze their actions. Scams come a dime a dozen, but it's worse when they specifically target your children. You need to know what to watch out for.  Here are the 10 most common Internet scams your child might fall for:
  
1. Knockoffs

Kids love clothes, especially teenagers. They want to be trendy and have all the latest designer styles when they know they can't afford it. So scammers create ads for all these "discount" online stores

The internet is a truly wonderful thing. Never in history has so much information been so readily available. All it takes is a query and a few pecks on a keyboard for a person to immerse themselves in books, videos, periodicals, tutorials and countless other forms of media. However, as information amasses in databases all across the web, so does material that is unsuitable for younger audiences.

Those of us who are in their thirties remember a time when the things that parents did and the things that kids did were totally separate.  Parents went to work, had dinner parties with their friends, or went to movies or the theatre.  Teens, on the other hand, hung out with friends at school, gossiped in the cafeteria, and went to raucous parties at each other’s places.  The only time that parents were able to monitor teens was when they were at home in the evenings.  Before the advent of cell phones, you couldn’t get in touch with anyone at a moment’s notice.

Now, the two worlds overlap all the time on Facebook, where parents as well as children have accounts.  It’s easy to keep an eye on teens by logging in and taking a look at their latest posts, especially if the teen has agreed to be “friends” with his/her parents on Facebook.  Although teens may not always want their parents to know what they’re up to, who they’re communicating with, and what exactly they’re saying, you still find many teens posting nasty comments about others when they know that their parents are sure to see them.

Do these kids just not realize that Facebook is not like a private diary?  Or are they actually hoping to be noticed by engaging in behaviors that psychologists call a “cry for help”?  A good example of a “cry for help” in real life, as opposed to the digital arena, is when a person swallows a large number of sleeping pills, but not enough to kill him/her, just enough to get him/her some attention from loved ones.  The person doesn’t know what to do to make things better and hopes to shock others into paying attention.  There are also more everyday “cries for help,” sometimes referred to as “acting out.”  These take the form of throwing tantrums, locking the door to one’s room, or constantly engaging in risky behaviors to get the attention of parents.

No one wants to see their child being bullied. As bullying becomes more and more prevalent in the media, it has become obvious that bullying no longer just takes on the "Steal your lunch money" tactics of past generations. 

Cyberbullying is, in many ways, more intense than in-person bullying. Cyberbullying acutely targets a child's insecurities, making the emotional and psychological bruises far more permanent than the traditional punch or swirly. Cyberbullying allows bullies to feel anonymous, freeing them up to say harsher, more pervasive things than they might say in person. Cyberbullies generally face fewer consequences- unlike in a traditional school context, there are no adults monitoring for signs of abuse on a regular basis, so unless a parent, guardian, or school official is tipped off to the problem, it can go unpunished for a substantial amount of time. 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

This guest post comes to us from Pierce Higgins, founder of AfterMath, a website that enables a child to earn his time online by answering educational challenges. 

It a great privilege to be asked to write a guest blog for uKnowKids.com, one of the world’s leading companies in the “Parental Intelligence” space. uKnowKids has a range of category-winning products for parents that cover areas such as social monitoring, mobile monitoring and location monitoring.

Today’s parents have become disconnected from the digital lives of their children and have become increasingly incapable of dealing with cyberbullying, sexting issues ,mortifying video clips on YouTube amongst many.