Are Dress Up Games Safe?

P arents are always concerned about the safety of their children online. Young girls are flocking to dress up game websites and this, of course, makes parents wonder how these websites and games stack up against the known dangers of profile and networking sites. Are dress up games safe?

Dress Up Game Safety
The answer to this is an easily resounding yes. In fact, dress up games might be the safest style of game young girls enjoy playing online today. What makes them so safe? The very nature of the game play is designed to give girls a focus other than the idle chit-chat that can put them in danger on other websites. In fact, when you use dress up games to create an avatar or profile pictures for networking or social websites, your daughter will actually be safer because of the dress up game.

Playing Dress Up Games
To play dress up games, your child will pull up a website specializing in these sorts of games. There are many dress up game websites including some of the more popular characters such as Barbie and Bratz dolls. The dress up game is very similar to paper dolls with a doll in undergarments waiting for your daughter to dress her in a fabulous outfit of her choosing.

The game itself is completely confined to a single website application and doesn’t involve any outside interaction or influence to play. Most dress up game websites have this style of game and very limited additional offerings. The larger sites, however, in the dress up game industry have more to offer those who enjoy this type of activity.

The Dress Up Game Community
For some websites, the dress up games are just the beginning of the fun. These sites present a bit more risk as they do have social components including rating dolls created by other members and discussing doll related topics online. Some sites even have profiles your child can create to give herself an online personality in these sites.

While dress up game websites are carefully monitored due to the young nature of the guests, your child is only truly safe online when you teach her how to behave in social settings. On a networking websites such as Facebook or MySpace, there is little commonality between your child and those around her. On a dress up game website, she’s surrounded by others with a common interest. The websites are typically much smaller than the kinds of sites you often hear about in the news. The size of the sites helps the owners monitor them more closely as well.

To help your child stay safe in an online community of any kinds, you can use a dress up game creation instead of pictures. Most profiles ask for a picture of some kind to help users identify each other in posts. Instead of actually posting a picture of herself (a huge no-no in keeping your child safe anywhere online), she should create a new doll using a dress up game and then save that doll as an image to be used as her avatar or profile picture. Then with her doll in place as her photo, she will be carefully masked behind the latest anime doll or mermaid creation.