I won’t give you a lecture on what age is the appropriate age for purchasing a mobile phone for your child, but I will point you to a fantastic resource where you can ask yourself the following questions posed by Common Sense Media:

• Are your kids pretty independent?
• Do your children need to be in touch for safety reasons?
• Would having easy access to friends benefit them for social reasons?
• Do you think they’ll use a cell phone responsibly  – for example, not texting during class or disturbing others with their phone conversations?
• Can they adhere to limits you set for minutes talked and apps downloaded?
• Will they use the text, photo, and video functions responsibly and not to embarrass or harass others? (Source: Common Sense Media)

Once you decide that your child is ready for a cell phone, you need to educate yourself and your child and ensure that “protection” and “phone” go together.

Read up on mobile phone safety tips to keep your...

AUTHOR: Katherine Fitzgerald, Law student University of Paris 8

Let’s face it – advertising is everywhere – on radio, television, posters, and unfortunately the Internet. We all know how annoying it is to try and navigate through the web and be constantly blasted with suggestive (and more frequently explicit) pop-ups. Nowadays they are never ending and crude, repetitive and distasteful.

Whilst we are sometimes shocked or irritated by such pop-ups we are (unfortunately) no longer surprised by them. The same cannot be said of our children. Pop-ups are indiscriminate and will appear whoever is behind the screen – as such adverts with pornographic images are almost unavoidable to any child ‘surfing the internet’.

On a personal note, being sick of those images popping up on my computer screen, I was advised to download a free ‘adblocker’ program that acts as a filter on my search engine, blocking all pop-ups from appearing (and sparing me...