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It is important to me that my children have an early and safe exposure to technology.
As a software developer and the father of three young children, I am concerned with the balance of protecting my children while still letting them become familiar and proficient with technology. It is important to me that my children have an early and safe exposure to technology. With my work, I am aware of both the security dangers and the spiritual and moral dangers that the Internet can present. I am also aware of the wonderful benefits that the Internet makes available.
I was thinking that I needed to protect the kids' computer from accidental encounters with dangerous materials on the Net. I was thinking about the best way to do that for several days. I didn't want something that would get in my way and I didn't want to pay a lot of money for it either. A day or so later, when I came home, I found my children gathered around the computer and laughing. I got that sick feeling in my stomach and felt immediately concerned. I went over to investigate. My oldest daughter, in an effort to visit a kid site, had misspelled the website name and fallen prey to a common tactic of those sites. They intentionally register websites that are misspellings of legitimate sites. Fortunately in our case, the website they stumbled upon was very mild and they had only just reached the main page.
I set out to fully secure the kids' computer to prevent mistakes like that again.
I quickly closed the browser and talked to my oldest about not typing in website addresses directly. After that, I set out to fully secure the kids' computer to prevent mistakes like that again. I also realized that our kids had no good way of visiting parent-approved sites without us being right there to get them to the site. That night, the first version of KangaPlace was born.
After talking with other parents I realized that this was a common problem. I also realized that many parents were letting their children visit a small set of children's websites and often didn't know about the sites other parents liked. This began the second major version of KangaPlace that was launched publicly.
We are thrilled to share KangaPlace with you and your family! We hope your family will love it as much as ours does and that you'll share it with your friends.
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