Everywhere you look today, there are smartphones and tablets in the hands of parents, teenagers, and children. This generation, like never before, is passionate about staying connected and being entertained by electronic devices in their hands.

Laptops have been hard enough to secure, but now smartphones and tablets are being carried around in children’s pockets or bags.

Ken Ham states in Raising Godly Children in an Ungodly World:

“Who is really training your kids? The TV? The kids across the street? The internet? Video games and movies? Dad {and mom}, don’t stick your head in the sand on this one. You’ve only got one shot at this. Don’t let the opportunity to train your children pass you by . . . the stakes are just too high for everyone.”

Our family absolutely loves anything digital — laptops, smartphones, Kindles, and tablets. Yet, we have decided to establish a few rules and boundaries in our home. Our main concern as parents is, “How are we to embrace our responsibility as parents and protect our three children from the dangers of the worldwide web as well as teach them how to use it?”

Here are the rules, boundaries, and tools that we use in our home:

Laptops:

All laptops are to be located in our family’s main living area.
All laptops have password protection, and only the parents know the passwords.
All laptops have a free security program called K-9 to help filter and block things on the internet.

Our children must have someone else in the room while using a laptop.

Tablets:

There are to be no Kindles or tablets in their bedroom at night.
There are to be no downloading apps without a parent’s permission.
All apps are to be approved by a parent.
All tablets will have the “Perfect AppLock,” and only parents can “unlock” the apps or internet that are locked with a code. (Best feature: If a child does try to break the code, after three tries, a picture is taken!)

There is a set “game” time each day, and no games are to be played outside of that time unless Dad or Mom allows it.

Smartphones:

Right now, our children do not have smartphones, and we do not plan to give them ones. (We’ll consider this when they turn 15). We do have a simple cellphone that can be used to make a phone call or send a text message that we can leave with them when needed.

As parents, we do have smartphones, and on these devices, we also have the “Perfect AppLock” and lock Facebook and internet apps. That way, we know that when we hand our smartphones to our children to use at any given time, there is protection there too.

My husband and I have embraced our responsibility as parents and are protecting our three children from the dangers of the world-wide web as well as teaching them how to use it.

Is it easy? No.
Is it time-consuming? At times, yes.
Do I ever get tired of stopping what I am doing to punch in a password? Yes.

But I also also rest a bit better, knowing that overall, we are raising this generation, our children, to the best of our ability and preparing them to make wise decisions when Dad and Mom are no longer there to protect.