Everything is good in moderation. That first piece of chocolate is delicious, but after the 20^th piece you start and feel a little bit sick. A twenty minute jog may be a great idea, but a two hour jog can be torture. This is a concept that can be applied to all walks of life.Online gaming is an area this is definitely applied to. Online games, such as Ben 10 online games and Scooby Doo games, are great for children if played in moderation and used properly. If your child does not commit the following six deadly gaming sins then they will have great fun and you will take another step closer towards appropriate digital parenting.

Have you seen the results from the newest study done by Pew Research Center about teens and technology?  You need to be reading it right now, the results will shock you. Here are some of the key findings:

• 78% of teens now have a cell phone, and almost half (47%) of them own smartphones. That translates into 37% of all teens who have smartphones, up from just 23% in 2011.

• 23% of teens have a tablet computer, a level comparable to the general adult population.

This guest post is brought to you by Tami Nealy, Senior Director of Corporate Communication with LifeLock. Today, she writes about child identity theft protection, one of the latest digital dangers parents should be educated on. 

Sexting is a growing trend as more and more people use cell phones for more activities. As an adult, the decision to sext is left to an individual (though still discouraged) but if your child is sexting, could he or she face criminal charges? The negatives of pre-teens or teenagers sexting are plenty but being prosecuted for child-pornography is also a possibility. 

How someone underage can be prosecuted:

Sending nude photos via text is a relatively new problem for law enforcement. Prosocuters try to keep child pornography from plaguing a society but your child could be caught up in it. Survey's show that about 1 out of every 5 teenagers have either performed or received some form of sexting. The problem is wide-spread and may only continue to grow. 

Teenagers from multiple states have been prosecuted and are facing criminal charges that could affect the rest of their life. Here are a few things that you need to know:

• Children are being prosecuted because most states and federal law consider any photo of a person under 18 to be a form of child pornography, no matter if the teenager was taking the picture of him or herself.

Another special shout out to the folks at SafeSoundFamily.  Tim's article was once again featured as one of their best family and child safety articles of the week. Check out the other contenders! 

Most people frequently hear cases of cyberbullying or sexting gone wrong in the news, but recently, we were reminded that even more intense dangers exist out there on the world wide web.  CNN Money did a great piece on this latest digital parenting concern entitled "Pimps hit social networks to recruit underage sex workers."  We thought all of our readers needed to know about this latest digital dangers, so we are sharing the article today. 

An interesting excerpt:

"It started with a Facebook Friend request....

It seems like our friends at SafeSoundFamily do a great job of rounding up the best safety articles of the week, and we especially like the "Online and Data Security" section.  Check these articles out that included everything from a seatbelt designed for a pregnant woman to the most prolific Craig's list scams. 

As part of an on-going blog series that began three weeks ago, we have interviewed some internet safety experts, parenting experts and industry leaders and are pleased to present our findings. Our questions centered around 'digital parenting' and what people thought were the biggest issues regarding this subject.  

Today we are featuring responses from our friend Tosin Williams, the founder of The Learning Period, an in-home tutoring service based in Los Angeles, CA.

uKnowKids: How has parenting changed with the introduction of so many digital devices?

A few years ago there was an extremely disturbing reality TV show called “To Catch A Predator.” The show was all about luring and then capturing men, who thought that they were meeting underage children for the purpose of sex. The show was taken off the air in 2008, but sent a chilling message to parents.  The sexual predator has evolved and is no longer wandering around playgrounds with a bag of candy.  They have become highly sophisticated internet experts, hanging-out online and infiltrating the sites where your children go.  But is the online predator a threat?

Statistics

• A recent survey that was carried out about internet predators, and asked over 1000 children aged between 10 and 17 concluded that:

• A figure of one in thirty three children had been asked to meet someone secretly.

• Just under a quarter of all child targets were aged 10 to 13.

Another big thanks to the SafeSoundFamily team for pulling together the 25 best family safety articles this week from many great sources--online, TV and print! We highlighted them last week, and were so impressed with the articles that made the list this week, that we had to share them with our readers.  SafeSoundFamily is free resource for home security information and alarm systems. Check them out!

As part of an on-going blog series that began two weeks ago, we have interviewed some internet safety experts, parenting experts and industry leaders and are pleased to present our findings. Our questions centered around 'digital parenting' and what people thought were the biggest issues regarding this subject.  

uKnowKids is pleased to announce that we have released our most important eBook yet! Entitled "Understanding Digital Parenting: The Essential Guide to Raising Connected Kids", this eBook is free of charge and jammed full of important information for parents of digital kids! Unlike previous generations, today’s parents struggle with trying to bridge an ever-growing information gap between what their child is doing online and what they can see their child doing at home. This eBook will help parents raise connected kids in a safe and trustworthy way. 

Cyberbullying has emerged as a new and pressing problem for schools and parents alike. The internet allows young people to participate in a world utterly removed from adult supervision: a world where bullying thrives and intimidation and harassment go unnoticed and unpunished by authority figures. 

Cyberbullying can take many forms – all of which can be potentially devastating. Cybullies may use threats of physical violence to frighten a child but, more often, they will use intimidation to cow and torture a child. They may either threaten to or actually post derogatory information about a child on popular social networking sites, like Facebook or Twitter, and they may use mobile devices to keep in constant contact with their target.

Cyberbullying, regardless of the form it takes, can be exceptionally harmful. Children and young adults are very susceptible to the emotional damage bullying and cyberbullying can cause, and, as Sameer Hinduja, Ph.D. and Justin W. Patchin, Ph.D. argue in their paper “Cyberbullying and Suicide,” cyberbullying can make young adults significantly more likely to consider suicide. Hinduja and Patchin find that this particular kind of adolescent peer aggression makes its victims twice as likely to attempt suicide compared with those who have not experienced it.

Keeping your kids safe on the internet can feel overwhelming and exhausting.  Between time spent researching safety tips, monitoring your kids' digital whereabouts, and arguing with them about online restrictions, a significant amount of your family time can be spent dealing with digital parenting issues. Several online websites can put a little fun back in to the process by teaching your kids digital safety while they play games and learn valuable lessons about staying safe online.  As a bonus for parents, it allows you to say to yes to an online experience, instead of always saying no; take those brownie points where you can get them!

Spotlight: A special thanks to Erin Raub and the SafeSoundFamily team for pulling together a weeks worth of great articles! The Web publishing team at Safe Sound Family consists of highly-skilled writers and editors who are passionate about and experts on family safety issues. Their team is dedicated to providing great advice and useful tips and information on home security and overall family safety topics. This week they included two articles from our parenting blog and we're excited about the posibitily of working with them in the future! Enjoy!

As part of an on-going blog series that began last week, we have interviewed some internet safety experts, parenting experts and industry leaders and are pleased to present our findings. Our questions centered around 'digital parenting' and what people thought were the biggest issues regarding this subject.  

As part of an on-going blog series that begins today, we have interviewed some internet safety experts, parenting experts and industry leaders and are pleased to present our findings. Our questions centered around 'digital parenting' and what people thought were the biggest issues regarding this subject.