The way to keep children safe in the virtual world is to give them the skills that they have always needed in the real world

The day after Barack Obama won in Iowa, I tried to engage my nine-year-old daughters in a conversation about what had the feel of a historic moment. "Oh yeah," one replied. "I've seen him on Presidential Paintball." I looked bemused, and she promptly Googled up a game in which players could adopt the persona of White House hopefuls, blasting away at each other with green goo.

It was one of those moments that make you love the internet. Kids who would otherwise have no interest in US politics could now reel off the field of candidates as if it were the Arsenal team. But such moments are far outnumbered by the paralysing kind: the porn site stumbled on in a search for pets; the latest supposed web suicide pact; some fresh warning about grooming on social networking sites.

So Tanya Byron's study into children's computer use is a timely response to a widespread sense of anxiety. Any day on the talk boards of Mumsnet.com you'll find parents asking each other how to protect their kids from the perils of the virtual world (this week's scare story is Miss Bimbo, the online game tempting teenagers with plastic surgery and diet pills). The big bad world that once started beyond the front door is now in our sitting rooms or, worse, behind the closed doors of our children's bedrooms. There's a sense that nothing we do can thwart them if they're determined to break the boundaries.

But whether grooming (the No 1 fear for parents) and bullying (the No 1 fear for kids) are widespread or not, many of Byron's proposals - about laws on assisted suicide, child internet safety, and the classification system for video games - make good sense. Codes of practice for social networking sites are sensible, if only to flag up the need for caution about what children post.

Full report: Good old parenting will keep the online bogeymen at bay