If you are a parent, you likely know the damage that your children can accidentally cause, especially financial damage. They might not understand that your credit card gets charged whenever they buy more lives for a game on your phone or that signing up for magazines will eventually lead for you having to foot the bill.

You also might have noticed that you're going through toner and paper on your printer really quickly and that your kids suddenly have a ton of pictures that they were excited about for ten minutes but are now littering the floors of their rooms. You probably can figure out what's going on: your kids are printing stuff from the computer randomly and wasting a ton of ink and paper. Here are some steps for securing your printer so that this does not happen.

1. Talk to Your Kids

The best solution is for you to talk to your kids. Explain that toner is too expensive to be used for no reason. Ask them to get permission before printing anything or to only print out things that they need for school projects. This will allow you to minimize the damage that your kids do and let them know that what they are doing is causing you problems.

Consider giving your kids a quota of pages that they can print each week as part of their allowance. This will allow your kids to get some things they want printed while still maintaining a reasonable amount of toner in the cartridges.

2. Let the Ink Run Down But Hold Some in Reserve for You

Another thing that you can do is just let the ink run down and keep the printer stocked with empty ink cartridges. This will make it functionally impossible for your kids to print. Be sure that you keep a cartridge or two in reserve for your own printing so that at least you can continue to use the printer.

3. Password Protect Your Printer

If you don't feel like switching out cartridges for your printer, be sure that you add a password so that it will not accept print jobs from anyone that does not have the password. This will allow you to make sure that you maintain your overall printer security without inconveniencing yourself.

For more information, talk to a company that specializes in printers. See what suggestions they have for dealing with your kids.