Safety Tips for Busy Working Moms

Inside: Tips on keeping your child safe with the help of technology.

*This is a sponsored post.

Arguably one of the most important tasks you have as a parent is to keep your kids safe and to help them learn how to keep themselves safe. Thankfully, technology has made this job easier for busy moms everywhere. Here are some of your options:

Parental Controls

The Internet is both an amazing and dangerous place, especially for children. On cell phones, desktop computers, and other devices, you can use parental controls to help manage your child’s online use. In the device settings, you can set how much time your child can stay online, set parameters for the types of content they can see, and stop them from making any unauthorized purchases.

Password protections ensure that you’re the one setting the rules when it comes to online usage, and not your child.

Here is a great checklist to help keep kids safe from scams using technology and being online. 

 

Location Tracker

With cell phones, parental controls also extend to tracking the phone’s location. By turning the phone tracker function on, you can know where the phone—and, consequently, your child—is at any time when they’re away from home and not in your immediate care.

If your child doesn’t have a phone yet, another option these days is wearable tracking devices. A popular option is tracking watches, which can both help your child make a technological fashion statement and keep an eye on where they are. Or you can simply click a tracker onto your child’s backpack to pinpoint their location.

 

Online Public Records

How sure are you that the other adults around your child are safe? Whether you’ve known the parents of your child’s friends for years, or you haven’t even met them yet, it can’t hurt to have more information about them. That’s where an online public records search comes in handy.

Simply input the name of the parent…or new neighbor, or online “friend.” After you’re sure you’ve found the right person, you can dig a little deeper to see if the person has any criminal records, if they’re a sex offender, or if they really are who they say they are. The information you find can help you decide if that person is okay for your child to spend time around or not.

 

Videos, Games & Interactive Puzzles

As long as the necessary precautions are taken beforehand (parental controls), technology is not only safe for kids to use, it can actually help you to teach them about safety. There’s no question that cartoons, video games, and other interactive puzzles appeal to children; and why not? They’re fun!

The colorful graphics and exciting action in cartoons and videos are also what can make them such a great learning tool, especially when it comes to matters of safety. They grab kids’ attention, which makes it much more likely that they’ll pay attention to the subject matter. Because of this, a variety of kids’ safety organizations have put out kid-friendly media to help ingrain the ideas of automotive safety, cybersecurity, what to do in case of fire or another emergency, etc.

 

These are just a few of the technological tools available to help working moms stay on top of their children’s safety. And with everything else you need to do, they are also an ideal way to ensure greater peace of mind.