Infants, toddlers, and even older children seek to mimic their parents in whatever they do. Have you ever been typing on a computer when your child comes in to the room? They naturally want to play with it, of course! But aside from turning off the computer, your little boy or girl could wreck havoc upon your personal computing device, deleting programs, messing up your desktop, or worse. Yet at the same time, turning off the computer just so your kid can play with it for a few minutes is really inconvenient. So what is one to do?

Never fear, for there exists a simpler and much more elegant solution! With my 10-month old baby boy in the house, he is a veritable Curious George about all things technology. When he see me working on a computer, then he decides that he absolutely must work on a computer, as well.

I was about to write my own computer program to provide some sort of lock-out functionality, but fortunately someone had already thought of the idea. Introducing Toddler Keys, a program written by another concerned parent on the internet. The program is available for download via Cnet's download.com, test and confirmed spyware and virus free.

Features of Toddler Keys include (some minor features are only functional in Windows XP):

• Locking your keyboard and/or mouse
• Locking your drives to prevent accidental ejects
• Disabling the power button
• Ability to disable accessibility functions while program is active
• Link sounds and pictures with various keys
• Mouse movements allow you to "draw" on the screen
• Customizable passphrase to unlock the screen and program

This is absolutely a must-have program if you want to protect your computer from smaller hands. My son loves pushing buttons and seeing pictures of himself appear on the screen!

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