Who is Denton
Family and technology are my passions…
I am a Risk and Security specialist for a large financial services organisation, ensuring the effectiveness of technology and security controls in protecting the organisations assets.
I am a loving husband to my wife and loving father to my two boys. I am one of the many parents who is not perfect and is constantly battling the parent – child screen time conundrum.
The one thing I am passionate about is protecting my children from the dangers of the internet, which is not a screen time issue, but a content access issue that all caring parents struggle with.
I love technology and watching how it can improve people’s lives. I spend time reviewing applications and their effectiveness in achieving their goals.
I also love spending time with my family and speaking to them about life and what difference they can make in the world.
How it all started…
My name is Denton and I decided to start writing a blog to help parents with the constant struggle they have in managing their children’s devices, online activity, and social media presence. I am not a perfect parent, however, I love and care for my family which drives me to do the best I can in protecting them from the dangers of the world. One of those dangers is the vast access our children now have to content on the internet and unfortunately, it is not all roses. Easy access to pornography, inappropriate content, and games are just a few of the hazards our children face when searching online.
Fortunately, I am not alone, and many caring parents have the same concerns I do. In that, good people have designed and developed products to help parents protect their families from these dangers. Not only content access is a concern, but the cybercriminals out there are constantly evolving and improving their attack strategies. My goal is to help parents navigate the different options they have in protecting their families’ devices from these criminals as well as protect their families from inappropriate internet content. In addition, I aim to help families grow by giving practical advice and ideas on family bonding, be it through vacations, games, simply eating together, and many more.
My expertise.
I have a degree in Marketing and Economics. I am a certified Risk and Controls Specialist through ISACA (the Information Systems Audit and Control Association) https://www.isaca.org/
I have sound knowledge of:
- Apple’s iOS and Android’s device protection settings.
- products and applications to protect users from malicious internet content.
- firewalls for home or small office PC’s.
- and more.
I have family experience, coming from a large clan, as well as parenting skills of kids from 0 to 17. However, parenting is a constant learning experience – a gift from God where we’ve been entrusted to care for them and raise them.
The journey:
I started in technology in 1994 and worked in various roles throughout my career, from e-mail administration, network engineering, firewall management, and IT infrastructure management through to Risk and Security specialist. I have been in the security space for nearly 10 years now and it was in 2005 when my family and I moved to London for a 7-year stint that Apple started to make waves about the imminent iPhone (1st generation) mobile device. Well as you know, from the release of this device, the applications followed marking the growth of a massive industry. Competitors joined in and as the world wide web grew quickly, so did the quality and ease in accessing content on the internet.
We had our first child in London in 2006 and within 3 years he could swipe on a smart device to the point that he could not understand why any old-fashioned device such as a TV was not touch screen. Our second child was born in 2010 and you can imagine by this stage, smart devices were a part of many people’s lives. So by the time our kids were 8 and 4 iPads were a household commodity in many middle-income families’ homes.
We had left London by this stage, and our children were in a new school, where iPads were required for learning. This was a blessing and a curse at the same time as they were learning to use something that would help them grow and develop, but at the same time, the parents would be introduced to the intolerable battle of “screen time”.
So my wife and I have been battling the device war since the beginning and we have much to share through this blog. As the children grew older, the challenges changed, from simple screen time to social media presence, online bullying, content access, content sharing, and so on.
Read the blogs as and when they are posted – they will help you with your battles and assist you in parenting in a caring and successful way.