Filtering programs, rating systems, child friendly ISPs, browsers for kids, safe search engines and monitoring systems can help you stop your children from coming across adult material like porn.

While the net has a lot of great information on it, it is still important to try and shield children from potentially harmful web pages.

There are some things you just don't want your kids to see!

Filtering programs

Filtering programs are designed to 'screen' web pages before your child has a chance to see them. They can screen for pornography and other content as well, such as violence, drugs etc.

Parents are given different degrees of control over the censorship depending on the program, and certain programs are more effective than others.

SurfWatch, Net Nanny, Cyber patrol and Cybersitter are some of the popular filtering programs.

For a full selection of available software, you can search on a website like download.com.

These programs may also help you to screen the material you child receives via e-mail or in chat rooms.

Ratings systems

Some websites are classified by a ratings system, so that you can better select what your child should and shouldn't be looking at.

These ratings generally come in categories, so you can exclude specific groups like 'pornography'.

Internet Explorer supports ratings through the 'content advisor' which you can find under the 'Tools' menu in 'Internet Options'. It allows you to restrict which sort of sites can be visited.

The main problem with ratings is very few sites bother to set the rating of their site so your kids may be stopped from visiting legitimate content.