Before we start this is a great big disclaimer. The contents of this post are my thoughts they are not an encouragement to do this for your own children. You know what you are comfortable with, you know your own children, make up your own minds and then take responsibility. This is something that suits one of my children each individual child would be different. If you are still interested in setting up a blog for a child then this is how I did it.

Why set up a blog for a child?

My youngest daughter, aged 9, has a blog. I know this is a fairly unusual, but she’s seen her parents blogging and running sites her whole life and wanted to start herself. This is a child who is fairly industrious and started a jewellery making business at 7.  Now there are many worries regarding having such a young child on the internet and we will cover them, ut there are also many hugely positive points and I’m going to cover them first.

• She gets to learn how to run a blog which I believe is a massive life skill
• She will learns about writing regularly for herself and not for school
• Her writing will improve every time she posts
• She will learn about image editing and design
• She has started animation so it will give her a platform to practice that.
• Its a forum where she can express herself
• Its something that we can spend time together doing

Now when starting up any hobby you have to weigh up the gains with the risk. I think the gains are huge but there are also some pretty large risks as well. There are some scary people out there and having a window to one of your children should scare the crap out of you. Especially one this young. Now something about Katie-Ann, she is an amazingly smart and mature well above her age group. She is also trustworthy and has a lot of street smarts. So the decision to be made was simply – is the risk for this particular child worth the benefits she would get out of it. If it was just giving a child a blog and letting there tear away I would say categorically no, but that is not what we have done.

I’ve take steps to protect and monitor this site so that it not openly viewable on the web. I monitor all posts and comments. If anything looks to be worrying I will pull the plug and she is aware of this.

The next post in this series will cover what I’ve done the minimise the risk without completely restricting her. It will also include what I will do in the future to continue to protect her while allowing her to develop the amazing skills that having a blog encourages.