Keeping your kids safe online - slang every parent should know

Do you have kids in your house that use a computer? Have you set up filters, blocked porn sites, and have a monitoring program where you can find out if the kids are talking about sex, or porn or worse yet meeting a preditor in a chat room?

Your filters won't pick up any of what is the new trend for today's teens. It's called 133speak, netspeak or plain Internet slang. Acronyms like lol which most know but what about mos, Mom over shoulder, or pos insert parent for Mom, tdtm, talk dirty to me, pir, parent in room, p911, parent emergency. Some use a single letter for a word like U replaces you, and R replaces are. Also used is true 133speak. This involves numbers being used instead of letters. A 4 replaces A, 3 replaces E, 7 replaces T and $ replaces S.

Many kids as old as 17 don’t know the difference between homonyms such as there, their, and they’re. There aren’t too many 17 year olds left who can even spell h-o-m-o-n-y-m anymore, and no it isn’t spelled with an i. Remember when your high school teachers used to complain about a comma splice? Today's high school teachers are struggling to teach kids how to spell, and instant messaging isn't helping.

If you have kids in your house you need to learn and understand their language. You may have filters that pick up porn but will they catch the word "porn"? What about "warez", which means illegally obtained software. Do your kids use Google image search? Most teens would know that online image searches are the best free porn sites there are. Talk to your kids. Set up your own AOL Instant Messanger and put your children's names on your buddy list. Then read their profiles. You might be surprised what they have put in there. Type their screen name, email address, name, or cell phone number into Google and see if anything pops up. You just might your child's picture , email address, and possibly a lot of private information about them listed on sites such as, hotornot.com, buddypic.com, facebattle.com, facethejury.com, or facebook.com.

Does your son or daughter have a livejournal or a blog? If so do you read it? You probably should. There’s nothing wrong with reading their diary if they’re posting it on the Internet. Thousands of other people are reading it. How much personal information are they giving to complete strangers? You'll be suprised.

I am thankful I don't have children in my home. Most of this information I never knew.