E-mail for children - any advice?

[weblette]

My 7yr old dd wants to e-mail her bestest friend in Northern Ireland and has asked for her own e-mail address.
While I don't want to be too restrictive, I want to try and find a child-appropriate way of doing this. Any ideas please?

Thanks!

Your service provider should hopefully have parental controls which allows you to set her email to only accept mail from known recipients. So you would have to enter her bestest friend's email address as a known recipient and then the world's your oyster.

Hth

My dds have their own email address, we have tight parental controls on any way and nothing has got through in 2 years.

My DD has had her own email address since she was 5 (she's now 8). She only uses it to email family members and, rarely, one of her friends. I have it set up so that it comes through to Outlook Express which is where my own email comes through to. This way, I can always read her emails before she does as they come through with mine even though she has a seperate address. She doesn't mind about this as long as I don't forget to tell her she's got email! The email address is from my ISP and can also be accessed via the web but she is not aware of this.

If your 7 yr old wants to email one friend I don't see this as being a problem, but I would personally not let her access her email via the web. If you do it the way I do, you have the option of checking her email before she sees it if you feel you need to.

Hope this helps,

FBB

A friend uses Safe2Read for her children. There's a charge $14/year at the moment for up to 10 email addresses.