Each baby leaves their own ecological footprint before they've even learnt how to walk.

Approximately 260,000 babies are born in Australia each year and most of these use some form of nappy for the first 2-4 years of their lives. All nappies have an environmental impact so each baby leaves their own ecological footprint before they've even learnt how to walk. The good news is that parents no longer have to choose between just terry cloth nappies and synthetic disposables.  There are so many options available today that it's now much easier for parents to make a greener choice.   

The nappy choice a parent makes will be determined by their baby's needs, their own lifestyle, budget and personal preference.  Many parents use a combination of cloth and disposable nappies and even move from one solution to another as baby grows.  Whatever you decide to use has to work for you. 

By Divonne Holmes à Court  

We're not doing enough to equip parents with the best information to make parenting a little easier and a little less stressful.

One of the most significant events of Kevin Rudd's term in office so far has been the recent 2020 Summit in Canberra. Over a busy two days, hundreds of people spent time together to discuss the best ideas and solutions for our country's future. Some ideas were smarter than others, but one of the most interesting themes to emerge was around prevention. We're all aware that acting now helps avoiding problems later - the 2020 summit discussed that investing in prevention today has a much better long term payoff than waiting for the problem to occur down the line and then trying to cure it.

But looking ahead to the future is hard and planning for it can be even harder. I only started thinking about the future when I became a parent for the first time.

By Dr Martyn Wild

Our kids might understand and recite the safety messages we tell them, but this rarely has much impact on their everyday behaviours.

The cybersafety discussion is more important today than it has ever been. Not simply because of the scare stories that are emerging with ever-increasing frequency (only last Thursday [5 June] we witnessed large numbers of Australians, including at least one teacher and a police officer, identified in the worst type of child exploitation). But more so because, (i) children are changing their use of the Internet; and (ii) their parents are evidently not taking responsibility for the implications that arise from that use.

New data arising from studies very recently conducted in the UK and Australia tell us that 57% of parents are not aware how to keep their children safe online, what actions to take to minimise potential adverse impacts on their children's well-being or even what to do at times of crisis.  

By Mark McPherson

If little Jimmy comes home from school and asks you to scan the home computer for trojans, listen to what he's talking about - chances are he knows more than you do.

This week we'll be working with kids from about half a dozen schools in Brisbane and taking them through a series of workshops at a purpose-built training facility at the University of Queensland.

We're going to break them up into mixed groups where they'll work with their  teachers to solve real problems faced every day by home computer users.

The challenge for us at AusCERT is that many of the attacks these days are carried out from computers in average homes, in average suburbs, often without the knowledge of the computer owners, so we're hoping to enlist average Australian kids in the struggle against cybercrime.