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A Guide to Keeping Your Children Safe Outside the Home

January 8, 2020 by dadofdivas Leave a Comment

Having a child can be worrying for new fathers, especially as they grow older and start to become curious about the world and have minds of their own. As a new dad, you might be concerned about your child’s safety when out and about as well as how to protect them in difficult circumstances. However, there are many methods to make your parenting experience more peaceful by finding ways in which you can keep your child safe in the big, wide world.

· Ensure Your Car is Safe

Every child needs the correct type of car seat to keep them safe when traveling and make sure that they are secure in an accident. Many car seats cater to both children and newborns, including the Clek Fllo, which is compatible with an extension called the Infant Thingy that makes this seat viable for young children. To find out more about the car seats on offer for your child, ParentingPod offers reviews on a number of different car seats, including ‘Clek Foonf Car Seat Review: Luxury, Style, & Safety But Is It Worth It?’, which details all that you need to know about the popular Clek Foonf car seat.

You should also use seatbelts to keep children from harm, even if they are using a car seat, as this will prevent them from hitting the windows of your car or otherwise hurting themselves in the event of a car accident. You can also keep kids safe within a car by installing child locks, stopping them from being able to open the door by accident.

· Take Precautions in Crowded Areas

Your child, especially newborns, should never be left unattended in any location outside of the house, especially in crowded areas such as shopping areas and parks, without a trusted adult’s supervision. You should be present until they are at least 8 years old, or even older, and you should not allow them to walk home from school or run errands until this time.

· Teach Them Safety Lessons

There are many precautions that you can teach your children that can help them to remain safe when they grow older, especially when you are not with them. One of the top schemes that have been used to teach children about safety is the Stranger Danger rule, which teaches children to be wary of strangers and to say no to anything offered to them when out and about by themselves.

· Have an Emergency Plan

Anything can happen when you are out and about, and although this should not put you off exploring with your child, it is important that you have an emergency plan in place so that your child knows what to do if they find themselves alone. This can include meeting in a certain place if a child becomes separated from you, showing them the lost child points in shopping centers and at events, and teaching them how to safely ask for help in shops or from other families.

· Be Mindful of Roads

Roads are one of the biggest dangers to your child’s safety when you are exploring the world together, and you should always be mindful of roads, even in rural areas. You should teach your child to cross a road safely as soon as they start to walk. This includes showing them how to stop, look in the direction of oncoming traffic (often both ways), and then crossing only when safe to do so. You should also teach them how to spot safe crossing places, such as marked pedestrian crossings and traffic lights.

· Protect Them Online

The modern age has introduced many new dangers for children as they grow up, and the internet can prove to be dangerous due to factors such as cybercrime, bullying, and child grooming. With 60% of children using the internet at home, you can protect them online by monitoring their online activity and any social media accounts that they have, placing parental controls on devices, and teaching them how to spot crimes and problems that they should be aware of.

· Find a Safe Day Care

Children, especially newborns, often attend day care, and this can be their first experience of aa location outside of the home. However, you still need to ensure that they can be kept safe at these locations by checking the facilities and reviews of the day care in question, asking to see the credentials and experience of the staff running the day care, and asking for advice from other parents in your local area to help you to find a safe and happy daycare for your children.

Keeping your child safe can help you to get the peace of mind that you need when you are a parent. Although it can be difficult to keep your child safe at all times without becoming a helicopter parent, there are many ways, as shown above, that you can help to prepare your child for the challenges that they may face outside of the home.

3 Ways Your Child Can Be At Risk – Take Control Of Their Digital Safety

July 18, 2015 by dadofdivas Leave a Comment

This post was inspired and sponsored by Domain.ME, the provider of the personal URLs that end in .ME. As a company, they aim to promote leadership to the tech world.

We are a social universe. You walk down the street and what do you see? People with their faces in their phones. Do you see people talking to each other while waiting for the bus, no, they are checking their email, or watching the latest youtube video. Today, information is at your fingertips and with each generation that passes, this becomes more and more commonplace. Soon, our youth will be learning how to “Google” before they completely know how to read, or so it seems.

This information overload and technological overrun, has both a light and dark side. Being able to access information and knowledge at a moment’s notice can lead to the genesis of a literate overall society. However, it also opens the door to safety concerns that all parents must be aware of and thus be able to make their children’s digital safety a priority. A part of this requires parents to take an active role in teaching their kids about what digital safety is all about, and what to watch out for as they are online.

3 Ways Your Kids Could Be At Risk?

Not All Search Terms Mean What Kids Think – Too often young kids spell items thinking that they mean one thing when in fact the search results bring up things that are not what you would want them finding. This is particularly true on sites like Youtube.com. However, if you are savvy enough to turn on some of the security and filter options, you can safeguard your kids from many of the most inappropriate sites that they might find on their own.
Not All People Are Who They Say They Are – Just like adults have to be wary of who they give their personal information out to, you have to teach your kids the same. Kids must know to never give their full name out to anyone, let alone their address or any other information that would allow someone to find out where they live.
Cyberbullying is a Real Thing – There have been story after story lately about many situations where this has occurred. Especially in social media, sometimes people that your children will be “friends” with may be there with ulterior motives that are contrary to what you would teach your own kids.

3 Ways You Can Help!

Get To Know Security Features – Get to know the security functions of the programs on your computer. BY knowing these you have the ability to augment and adjust to either cut back access to information or at least curtail specific information to make sure that family-friendly content reaches your children.
Talk to Kids About What To Share – There is something about social networks that can draw you in. You can get to be a bit manic as you watch for the most up-to-date followers, comments or the like. It is important to talk to your kids about what these things are and what they stand for. Once kids understand this, it is also important to talk about what you respond to and how to respond, as too often people can take post sentiments to heart and beat themselves up over small trivial matters.
Set Up A Safe Space For Your Kids – Make sure to set up a safe environment for your kids to talk to you about their concerns, questions and the like – no matter what they are. Make sure that no question or concern is out of bounds because you want your kids to be comfortable approaching you with things they are seeing, hearing about and the like as they begin to search for themselves.

While these risk factors and tips are just ones that scratch the surface, as a parent you have to take control of your children’s digital safety so that they can learn great strategies and habits that will stay with them as they get older and want even more access to information. Setting up boundaries and parameters now, you will have the ability to get them ready for a lifetime of good habits in the future and keep them safe too!

Some Additional Resources & Articles

Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act
Common Sense Media
National Children’s Advocacy Center
Babble
Huffington Post
The Guardian

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A Good Vacation is a Safe Vacation #dadchat

June 11, 2014 by dadofdivas Leave a Comment

A Good Vacation is a Safe Vacation

We’ve all seen the classic vacation movies starring Chevy Chase. We know how fun and exciting a good road trip can be. But that series of movies is not the last word on family and buddy road trips.

My personal favorite is the Sponge Bob movie. Perhaps you bend more towards Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, or Little Miss Sunshine. Whatever Hollywood inspired fantasy comes to mind when you think of a road trip, they all have at least one thing in common: They all present an element of danger and a brush with the unexpected.

What those movies do not realistically depict is the aftermath of the calamities that seem so riotously hilarious at the time. Nobody walks away from a car flipping over three times. The grill that blows up in your face after dowsing it with three cans of lighter fluid is seriously going to blow your face off. The bar fight you got into with the Hell’s Angels after knocking over a row of vintage motorcycles is going to leave you injured, and in the hospital for a very long time. When you get out, everything is not going to be all right.

So before taking that two day road trip to Fun World on the opposite coast, let’s take a brief moment to be sure that the worst annoyance your family experiences is the 100^th repetition of, “This is the song that never ends.”

Auto accidents

Fully one in five people suffer some kind of injury on a vacation. Driving is only the second leading cause. Personal Injury Digest reports:

6 million – average number of car accidents every year.
3 million people are injured every year in car accidents in America.
Around 2 million drivers experience permanent injuries every year from car accidents.
40,000 people lose their lives every year due to major accidents while driving.

Familiarizing yourself with the features of the car you will be driving can mitigate these risks. Swap drivers frequently to insure plenty of rest for each driver. Take plenty of potty breaks to keep unspoken frustrations from building. And keep the number of a good accident attorney handy in case statistics catch up with you. Mike Pines, an expert from San Diego, lists over a dozen types of personal injury claims in the San Diego area.

Food poisoning

Auto accidents are the second leading cause of calamity on vacation. The number one cause is food poisoning. It is said that we suffer from food poisoning all the time. It is just that the symptoms are often so mild, we ignore them and move on. Vacation eating is quite different from day to day eating. On vacation, we try things that we normally would not try, and eat at questionable places that we would never eat at locally.

Depending on where we vacation, those stomach cramps after that double spicy pepper sandwich may not just be due to the fact that it was double spicy peppers we were eating. Restaurants that cater to tourists might tend to take short cuts in food safety for the sake of feeding more people, faster, and cheaper. If you are not familiar with the lay of the land, seek reputable local recommendations. If the locals don’t eat there, neither should you.

Dangerous activities

Everyday, the ER fills up with people injured in ways they would rather not talk about. They are ashamed to accurately recount the details of how they came to be injured because they were doing something epically stupid. For some reason, people see vacation time as the perfect opportunity to try something that, on another day, they would consider epically stupid.

There is nothing particularly stupid about skiing unless you are afraid of heights and have a terrible sense of balance, and poor depth perception. At that point, you should really be questioning why you are strapping on those skis. Is rock climbing really a good fit for your vertigo? Does a second trip on the levitating, triple loop roller coaster make sense with your blood pressure?

There is nothing wrong with trying something new. But we should never trade in common sense for a momentary good time. That is almost always a bad trade. If the activity is something you wouldn’t do on a Monday when you are stone cold sober, you shouldn’t do on a Saturday when intoxicated with the bad judgment typically displayed while on vacation. Your hand-eye coordination and reflexes are not better when on vacation.

A good vacation is a safe vacation. You will not have less fun because you drove safely, ate wisely, and skipped walking over hot coals with your bare feet.