Parenting Tips: Protecting Our Children

As a mom, I am very concerned about the safety of my children. Daily news prove that anybody can be a target of predators especially our children. What can we do as parents to protect our children?

We must be committed and smart parents. Being a committed parent means knowing our children, listening to them, and being aware of what they're doing and who they're with. Being a smart parent means putting in place safety precautions to keep our children safe from predators.

Let me suggest 2 specific actions we must add to our to-do list to protect our children.

1. Know what type of people our child gets to be around with and that includes their friends, their friends' parents, the nanny and even the friendly plumber or cable man. Before we let them go out for a party or any type of gathering, it would be good if we could know about the people our children are socializing with.

Do you know we can conduct our own people search investigation to find out about anyone online free? Search engines are a powerful tool that scans all web pages for relevant information linked to a person's name. It would add an extra protection on our part if we would do some background check on people whom we don't really trust.

2. Each day billions of children log onto the internet to do research, email, chat, and play games. A large majority of content available on the internet is not suitable for our children like pornography and violence.

It is important to set up our computer's parameters so that they cannot access these websites. Protectyourchild.org gives a free step-by-step instruction to do that and it would only take 2 minutes to do so. Installing an antivirus, anti-spyware and anti-identity theft software on your computer is almost always a must.

Here's a helpful video about Teaching Your Kids to Be Safe Online. I think every parent should watch this.

There is simply one thing you cannot get enough of these days: safety.