This past April was National Child Abuse Prevention Month. The month was dedicated to raising awareness about child abuse and, more importantly, to preventing it. The Internet adds a new dimension to child abuse, as children of all ages can become victims of online pedophiles and child pornography.

Protect your child by addressing the issue of child pornography early. No one – including smart kids, good kids, or happy kids – is exempt from the possibility of being victimized. Being informed is the only protection your kids have. Teach your child to avoid becoming a victim of a child predator or exploiter by:

When a child’s identity is stolen and impersonated, it’s hard to detect. Children and teens are still years away from using their social security number to get jobs, apply for colleges, open credit cards, or get mortgages – so fraud involving their identity can go undetected for years. Precisely for that reason, children and teenagers are a favorite target of identity thieves.

Of course you should still shred important documents and bring in the mail right away, but today’s identity thieves are less likely to be sifting through trash or stealing mail when they can get the information they need from our kids in Internet chat rooms or through phishing emails.

Things were sure different when we were kids. If we needed to call mom and dad away from home, we had to find a pay phone. But cell phones are becoming more and more common with our kids, even among those as young as 6 years old.

Kids and Mobile Phones

In 2008, 51% of 12-year-olds owned cell phones, up from 18% in 2004. Among tween mobile phone owners, the average age of receiving the first phone is 10 or 11.

Parents are ostensibly providing their kids with cell phones so that they can keep tabs on them, stay connected, and make sure their kids always have access to help when they need it. But what is a 7-year-old doing with his phone, anyway?

YouTube provides a completely free platform for uploading, sharing, and viewing video content on any subject. You can laugh over a parody of Twilight, see your nephew take his first steps, learn how to seal the grout on your tile floor, or prove to your kids that an octopus can, in fact, fit through an opening the size of a quarter. Here’s what you need to know about using this powerful tool called YouTube.

Watching Videos on YouTube

Anyone can watch videos without registering with YouTube. You can search by content to find pretty much anything you want, and YouTube will suggest related content.

We know that tweens and teens are really, really good at texting. Texting while walking, texting discreetly in class, carrying on multiple text conversations at once. But is there a difference among kids in who texts the most?

Turns out that it’s no coincidence that both the winners and half-dozen finalists in the 2009 and 2010 LG Texting Championships have been female. Girls do the bulk of the texting the majority of the time, specifically teenage girls.

Putting the family computer in a well-trafficked, central location of the house has always been one of the first lines of defense for parents who want to keep their kids safe online. But monitoring kids' online life is harder for parents in this decade because of Internet-enabled cell phones.

The traditional computer still appears to be the method of choice for going online (probably because of the bigger screen and the easy-to-maneuver computer mouse), but the cell phone is catching up fast.

Most people your child meets on the Internet will be harmless, but there’s still danger in making friends online. Child predators use the Internet to meet children and form relationships with them, the end result of which is to molest or abuse them in the future. This process is known as “grooming,” and it’s vital that you recognize grooming while it’s happening, so you can stop it before it goes too far.

Predators groom children by lending a listening ear, making them feel special, treating them “like a grown up,” introducing sexual speech or pornography to make such acts seem more acceptable, encouraging secrets, and introducing them to other adult behaviors like drinking and doing drugs.

So you’ve had the Internet safety conversation with your child: no giving out personal information online, no talking to strangers in chat rooms, and no sending elicit photos or texts. What next?

As a parent, you need to monitor your child’s online activity to make sure that your teen or tween is actually following the rules you’ve already discussed. That’s not spying – it’s parenting.

In March, Ashleigh Hall’s name was splashed across newspapers everywhere after her body was found in a ditch. The 17-year-old had done something that a worrisome number of teens do: made a new friend on Facebook and gone to meet him.

A 2006 survey commissioned by Cox Communications with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported that:

• 71% of teens reported receiving messages online from someone they don’t know

• 45% have been asked for personal information by someone they don’t know

• 30% have considered meeting someone that they’ve only talked to online

• 14% have actually met a person face-to-face that they’ve only talked to on the Internet (the figure for teens ages 16 and 17 jumps to 22%)

In Ashleigh’s case, her new friend was a predator who had lied about his identity, posing as a 17-year-old boy. Many were quick to point fingers at Facebook: can’t they do more to prevent people from lying about who they are online?

Sexting. To a parent’s ears, even the name is scary. Here are some of the straight facts about sexting, who is doing it, and why. And most importantly, how to talk to your kids about why it can be dangerous.

Sexting is using mobile technology to send a suggestive nude or semi-nude picture of oneself to someone else. It’s been around since about 15 minutes after the invention of the camera phone and the text message, but has gotten much more prevalent in recent years now that so many teens and tweens carry around their own personal cell phones.