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Protecting Your Kids From Cyber Sharks: Cyber Savvy Tip #1 by Bob Kessinger
Pictures, once shared on the Internet are out there to stay, with no guarantee you can delete them. It’s not just drunken photos on FaceBook or MySpace that might come back to haunt your teen at job time, that you have to worry about.
Innocent photos, in combination with other personal information posted and shared online, can provide more than enough details for a predator to stalk your child. Take a picture of a cheerleader, standing in front of their house, with the address showing.
From just this one photo, any interested observer can find out just about everything they need to know. The neighborhood they live in, the economic class they belong to, the color and design of their cheerleader uniform and potentially the school they attend, how sophisticated or not they appear. You get the picture.
We need to teach our children to be very careful what information they share, and with whom. What they think is private often isn’t.
- Bob Kessinger, CyberPatrol
Bob is the co-author of Surfing Among the Cyber Sharks: Parent’s Guide to Protecting Children and Teens from Online Risk – June, 2009.
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SImple internet safety tip for dads
Set up a Google alert for your child’s name. You can get a daily digest. You won’t see everything but might get advance warning of any problems. Adults should do this as well, by the way.
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Dad Tip – Combing Wet Hair May Be Best Way to Find Lice – NYTimes.com
Lice is part of life, especially for parents of girls in kindergarten through about third grade. At our school, lice checks are always done in the morning, on dry-haired kids. Research, and practical experience, says that lice checks need to be done on wet hair. This is when you can see not only the nits (the eggs), but the actual moving lice which spread the epidemic.
living lice are the moving transmitters of the epidemic, and visual inspection found only 6 cases, while wet combing found 19. In other words, the odds of finding moving lice were about three times higher with wet combing.
[From Vital Signs - Combing Wet Hair May Be Best Way to Find Lice - NYTimes.com]
Happy nit picking. No one likes lice, but it’s just part of growing up.
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Older Dads Father Dumber Kids?
This one hits closer to home since I was already 43 when w had our first.
A recently released study finds that children of older dads score lower on IQ tests even after weighing socioeconomic factors.
Australian and US researchers analyzed test results of more than 33,000 US born children born to fathers between the ages of 14 and 66. The tests included reasoning, concentration, learning, memory and speaking and reading skills, at eight months, four years and seven years.
The lead author, John McGrath says that he was surprised by the results, since a lot of the “blame” for DNA errors usually goes to older eggs in the mom. Luckily, McGrath says the “effect we see is very small.”
Despite my advanced age, my kids are still among the smartest, most beautiful and well-behaved on the planet.
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From the “There but for the grace of God…” department
Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?
The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer — beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone — he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.
It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide.
This is a particularly chilling article on how leaving babies in the back seat of cars to die in a closed car is a tragedy that happens to all sorts of people. As a society, we demonize these poor people who already have suffered the worst event that could ever happen to a mom or dad. And then, we subject them to criminal prosecution. The truth is that this is a horrible unintended consequences of an unrelated safety issue. When airbags were put in cars, new laws required babies and children to move to the back seat, putting them out of sight, and sometimes tragically, out-of-mind.
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