At one time, the World Wide Web was a safe place for your children to explore, work on their homework and chat with friends. Now, keeping your children safe while they surf the web has become a full time job. Pedophiles and sex offenders are using the internet to prey on our kids.

Nobody ever said that being a parent would be easy. The World Wide Web and online sites like MySpace.com are making our jobs more and more challenging. MySpace is a social networking site where kids can share pictures, chat with friends and make new friends. MySpace requires that members be fourteen years old or older and they warn kids not to post personal information. Sadly, this is a warning that many kids choose to ignore.

A point of frustration, when dealing with kids, is that they can be fearless. You can give them the warnings. You can explain the dangers. There are cyber bullies, adults posing as teenagers and countless forms of harassment. Unfortunately, many kids believe that these things happen to other people, not them.

The statistics are sobering. According to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, in 2005 there were over 2,600 instances documented where adults were using the World Wide Web to prey on potential victims. Such facts can be a frightening reality when you consider the time your kids spend online.

It would be simple if you could turn your kids loose on the internet and expect that they will make all of the right choices. Sorry to say, it

Following continuing pressure from politicians (and parts of the media), MySpace is planning to offer parents the chance to download software which will monitor aspects of their children’s activities on the social networking site.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn’t enable parents to read their child’s e-mail or see the child’s profile page and children would be alerted that their information was being shared. The program would continue to send updates about changes in the child’s name, age and location, even when the child logs on from other computers.

From a business point of view, the move appears to be a highly risky one. The young users of social networking sites are notorious for their lack of loyalty

You may be familiar with the website MySpace. It was originally designed for social networking and was only intended to be used by adults. However, there are a growing number of kids who have MySpace profiles.

A lot of MySpace pages contain stories of teen sex and other topics that parents may find to be inappropriate for their children. This kind of adult oriented content is only a small part of the problem.

A frightening issue with teens and kids using MySpace is that they fail to realize that there can be future consequences for their online activity. Information and photos that are posted today can come back to haunt them years down the road.

Most kids make the mistake of believing that all of the profiles on MySpace are actual representations of the users. Many are just not willing to recognize that a lot of the people that they come into contact with on MySpace are not who they say they are. This is obviously a problem, when you consider the dangers of sexual predators who might use MySpace as a way to find potential victims.

There are several ways to connect with people on MySpace. Much like e-mail there is a messaging service. There is also the popular instant messenger which allows users to chat one on one.

As parents, we are hard wired to protect our children and keep them safe, regardless of how old they get. Teens can be particularly susceptible to the pressures of society and their peers. As teenagers, many believe that they are indestructible and nothing can hurt them. As parents, we need to educate ourselves on the good and bad points of MySpace so that we can take the steps necessary to protect our kids from danger.

There are websites out there that are not as harmless as we want to believe. A major issue concerning this fact is that kids won