Making Back To School Safer
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Kids are heading back to school. I kid. As they head back to campus this year let’s make sure they’re safe. In this episode we discuss the hidden dangers in first day of school signs, spotting danger before it starts and how we can be proactive about keeping our school secure in the future.
The Hidden Danger
A popular trend for the first day of school is to snap a photo of your kid before they go off on their first day of their new grade. We make a sign for our kids to hold up with all sorts of information that we may forget over the years.
While these photos will pop up in our memories on social media for years, sharing these photos may have unintended consequences. The signs we make for our kids to hold up in these first day of school pictures can reveal too much information about our children. We discuss this at length in this episode of The Secure Dad Podcast.
These types of signs are nice, but they do not need to be shared online.
While we are the normal, decent people of the world, not everyone shares our morals. Predators and human traffickers can use this information to target our kids and groom them for kidnapping.
Using the information on these signs, a bad guy can approach your child with a made up story using real details like your child’s name, school and teacher. Once a predator has your child’s attention and builds false trust, it can be easy to convince your child to leave with them. Do not post these signs on social media.
Instead, I’ve created a free safe sign that you can download to use this year to post your pictures on social media. My printable sign doesn’t have information about your child and will be safe to share online. Then you can swap this sign out for a more personalized photo that is not to be shared online. If you use a Secure Dad sign consider, tagging it with #securedad.
Download your free printable first day of school sign here. It will print on a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Please share this post with a friend so that we can make our kids safer! For more on keeping your family safe, consider The Secure Dad Field Notes.
