Safe Eyes, Safe Heart

Many of us have pre-teen and teen-aged children. You know how hard it is to keep your children constantly supervised, much less supervised online. In this day and age, it is very necessary to constantly stand over your child's shoulder and monitor their every move online. However, that is not at all practical.
There is a saying that I love: Garbage In, Garbage Out. I don't want anyone in my household to be spewing out garbage, or any more garbage than we already do, so I want to control the amount of garbage my children even have the opportunity to get to.
Several times the boys have been given a web address from a friend, "Go check this site out, it's really cool!" Sure, cool, that is the word I'd give that site..... ahem. Not that they don't come across enough garbage without their friends "help."
I have tried various software to try to keep them safe, and yet to still be able to maneuver around the internet myself. Many sites would block MY blog, because I do talk about body parts and breast feeding, etc. I can't have that!

What I want is a program that keeps my children from viewing sites that have inappropriate things on them, and yet doesn't restrict me from the sites that are OK for me to view. Each person needs their own settings, not only to give different amount of control, but also so that I can track who did what when. Oh, yes, I want to know who went to youtube at 3:45pm.

What about IM's? You can hardly restrict teens from IM'ing and still have them not be ostracized at school. But what can you do to make sure they are staying safe? I want to know if something comes up that I need to see. Like an alarm that says "Hey, your kid said a bad word." or "Someone tried to talk to your child about sex." Then the program would need to let me see a transcript of that conversation so I could judge the severity of the infraction.

I am now trying Safe Eyes because it does all that! (I have had it awhile, but my computer wasn't cooperating until now) It also allows you to specifically allow or block just parts of a site, like on youtube, so they can still watch videos, but can't access certain ones. Each person has to log in with their own user name before surfing the web. The younger kids I set a time limit of 1 hour a day, and then they are no longer allowed access to the web. Nice!

I get alerts if they see or say or visit places that they shouldn't go to, and then I can see if it was an accidental visit of 2 seconds, or they lingered there a bit.

The only thing I did not like is that there is a feature that allows you to go to their site and see what each account did and it tells you how many inappropriate visits that person had on each day. I got online for 1 hour, just checked my email, checked my blog, and the blogs of 5 of my closest friends with the same values I have. I had TWENTY SEVEN severely bad visits on my log. None of them were accurate, like pornography pictures, etc. If there is a link to somewhere on a site, it shows that as a visit. It brought up my site counter, which I had not gone to, but there is a link to it on my blog. It didn't show up as a bad visit, but it did come up as something I looked at.
That feature will potentially cause some misguided punishments for my children.

Other than that, it is a super program, and has a great price. It is $49.95 for a year of protection.
Keep the garbage OUT!







Internet porn is capturing the hearts and very lives of so many people. It is really sad, and truly heartbreaking to see the devastation that it brings on families. It nearly tore our family to pieces, but we are free, healed and moving on.
Here are some great links to help people over come their addictions to pornography.
Addiction Recovery Organizations
New Life Ministries
Setting Captives Free
Pure Online
Higher Calling
Healing for the Soul
XXXChurch