Your questions answered by Brian Mooney.

• I was shocked to discover recently that my eldest daughter, who is 14, was logging on to a website that allows students to make very personal comments about fellow students, not necessarily from their own school. She claimed that she visited the site to check out whether she was a target of negative comment. I have always encouraged my four children to use the internet as an educational tool, but am now beginning to realise that I may have exposed them to a world of potential danger, way beyond their capacity to comprehend or deal with. Should I remove internet access from my home PC?

The world of the internet is the world your children and yourself will have to navigate for the rest of your lives. It is an extremely powerful, useful and, yes, potentially dangerous resource. I would encourage every parent to begin educating their children on the appropriate use of the internet from an early age. Along with such education, parents should ensure that they protect their home computers using the various packages available for such purposes.

Start with your internet service provider (ISP) and check out what free parental controls it offers that will limit your children's access to websites and communication features (e-mail, instant messaging, chat etc) by age, content category, time and other choices. If your ISP lacks that capacity, your browser, which enables you to view web pages, gives you options. Internet Explorer has Content Advisor (under Tools/Internet Options/Content), which filters out language, nudity, sex and violence on a 0 to 4 scale. Safaris (for Mac users) also have parental controls such as filtering.

You can also use search engines such as Google to protect your children. Once you set restrictions, Google will block sites with explicit sexual material (see Safe Search Filtering). AltaVista puts several types of offensive content off limits with its family Filter (Settings/Family Filter set up). For your younger children, consider confining online exploration to web addresses that list child-safe sites on everything from TV, films, music, and games to world history. Examples include Yahooligans and Ask Jeeves for Kids.

A range of products is also available to protect children www.cyberpatrol.com offers the facility to deflect objectionable web content with a twofold filtering technique. www.controlkey.com enables children to do homework-related research, access their own documents, but not open your desktop check register. For keeping in what is good, as opposed to keeping out what is bad, www.kidsnet.com includes websites that have been vetted and classified according to Internet Content Rating Association and Kidsnet standards.

Apart from these, an internet security product such as Norton Internet Security 2006, provides everything; parental control over web content and Internet access, virus protection, spam blocking, privacy preservation and firewall protection.

If you want to know exactly what your children have been viewing online, www.spectorsoft.com provides software for monitoring and recording every detail of PC and internet activity in your home.

In addition to the technological options available to you to protect your children from undesirable content on the internet, I would suggest that the most effective method is attentive parenting.

This should start with awareness that the television, which many children now have in their bedrooms, is a hugely influential factor in the formation of attitudes and values and needs monitoring, especially if you have access to a wide range of channels.

The PC, where it is present in the home, should be placed in a relatively public area, which can allow for non-obtrusive parental supervision. This strategy can be of reduced value if your children are often at home alone.

The best protection of all is to talk to your children regularly about the information they are accessing, through all forms of information technology.

Brian Mooney is president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors. E-mail questions to bmooney@irish- times.ie