Wrist Road ID - The Way to Go

Parents invented various ways to keep the children safe especially at the crowded place. While some hold tight their children's hand, some were seen using a strap to connect between them and their children. There is another way that may be quite effective to keep our children safe. 

While the hand holding and using of the strap are seen more to ensure the children do not get separated from us, this other way that we are going to share with you serves as a tool to reconnect our children with us in case they are separated from us, mostly at the crowded places.

Wrist Road ID is what we would like to share with you. 

Wrist Road ID is a wrist band that contains our personal details such as emergency contact number, address, blood type, etc. In fact it is up to us to put what details we want on the Wrist Road ID (refer to the photo above).

Wrist Road ID was originally created for athletes such as runners, marathoners, cyclists, triathletes, etc who do a lot of outdoor training. It serves as a "spokeperson" in the event the owner/athlete is found unconcious, perhaps due to accident during individual training. To understand more how Road ID started, click here.

Enough of the athletes story, let's see how Wrist Road ID can work for us to keep our children safe. First of all, as we mentioned earlier, hand holding or using the strap may be useful but it does not 100% guarantee that our children won't get separated from us. That is when the Wrist Road ID comes to our help. With the Wrist Road ID on our children, they will have information about the parents such as the contact number, in case of accident, it will have our blood type. Hence, when the child goes missing, it will be easier to reconnect with us as the person who found our child will be able to immediately contact us.

Something to ponder.It is never expensive when it comes to our children's safety.

4 Tips to Keep Your Kids Safe Online

We posted an article and a youtube video earlier about the children's safety online. The article titled "Our Children's Activities Online...Do We Care to Know?" encourages parents/guardians to be more proactive and bother to know about what our children do online. Now we want to share the tips about how to keep our children safe online. Knowing what they do online is one thing and keeping them safe is another thing. The two compliments each other.

This generation of kids spends more time online than any generation before it, which makes it increasingly hard to protect them from online dangers. According to a 2010 study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 93% of teens use the Internet, and the National Crime Prevention Council found in 2008 that on average, adolescents 18 and younger spend around 18 hours per week online. So how do you protect your kids without spending all your time standing over their shoulder? Here's a quick guide to keeping your kids safe online: 

Open Communication

The biggest thing parents can do to help keep their kids safe online is to talk to them about what they do, see and experience there. Keep the conversation open, and be sure they know they can come to you if they see or experience anything that worries them. If you explain your rules and worries, kids will be better prepared to help themselves stay safe online.

Filtering Inappropriate Content

Many parents worry about the material their kids are able to access online, and with good reason. There are hundreds of millions of websites online, and some are full of information that may not be suitable for young kids or even older teenagers. In a study by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2006, 34% of young people reported seeing sexual materials online that they did not want to see. Many parents use parental control software, at least while kids are young to block some of the less appropriate material. Most operating systems (like Windows or Mac OSX) including filtering capabilities, or you can add on a separate application like Net Nanny to help out.

Social Network Safety

Though kids under the age of 13 are not allowed to have profiles on most large social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, it's fairly easy to get around this rule, and many kids do. Consumer Reports projected in 2011 that around 7.5 million of Facebook's users were under the age of 13. We encourage parents to enforce the sites' rules about underage members if they can. There's plenty of time for Facebook later. If you're concerned your pre-teen has a profile he or she's not telling you about, you can check your computer's history or use parental control software to track activity.

Facebook also does its best to filter out underage profiles, flagging users who mostly have much younger friends to be sure they're the age they claim to be and responding when other users flag underage profiles.

For teens between 13 and 17, Facebook automatically imposes stricter privacy settings than those it uses for adults, so be sure your child is using the correct birth date on signup. According to Facebook's customer service department, the profiles of minors are automatically hidden from public search and Facebook restricts tagged photos and posts to just your child and his or her friends, at the most.

Sharing Information Online

This brings us to the importance of talking to teens about sharing information online. As many people have learned in the last few years, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other websites are public places, and information you post there can and will be seen. Even after a post or a photo is deleted, it can be hard to wipe it completely. For the sake of their online reputations, it's important that kids and teens understand that what they share online can form a permanent record. If they'd rather a parent, grandparent, teacher or employer not read something, they shouldn't post it online.

If you'd like to see just what your child's profile looks like to a stranger or a specific friend, just ask your child to log in and then use the "View As" link at the top of the timeline to see what shows up. We also recommend that parents "friend" teens on Facebook and check in to see what they're posting regularly.

While it's impossible to completely monitor everything your kids do online, these steps will help keep your kids safe and informed while they are on the web.

This article is taken from here