Anyone who’s a parent knows how difficult it can be to keep your children safe when you’re not around. On any given day, children face numerous challenges, threats, and peer pressure. It seems like almost every day there is a new story in the news about child abuse or kids shooting up in their schools or kids shooting other kids. This is enough for a parent to want to lock their children in a plastic bubble and never let them leave the house. But we as parents know that while we don’t want any harm to happen to them, we can’t restrict them to the nest or they will never grow into strong-minded adults.
That is why it is our duty as parents to give our children the tools to protect them every time they leave home. Hundreds of child naps occur each year in America and there are thousands of reports of missing children everywhere in the newspapers on buses, streetlights and milk bottles. Therefore, it is important that your children know what to do when confronted with a stranger, make sure that you not only teach them the basics, such as not talking to strangers and not accepting candy from anyone you don’t know, but it is also important to teach them other things like a secret word because surprisingly, in most childhood naps, the child knew the person beforehand.
When violence in schools happens more frequently, then there are no children who knew about it beforehand but for some reason didn’t speak up at the time, so make sure you impress on your children’s heads exactly how important it was to inform their parents and the school about any potential threats. Peer pressure is something that goes on everywhere in every school in America and it’s hard to deal with because our kids want to fit in and we want to see our kids fit in with their peers but, recently, peer pressure has started to lead to tragic behavior, an example of this is the two girls who committed suicide together on a train, which could have been three tragic losses if the third girl had done it. That’s why make sure your kids know the difference between right and wrong and know exactly how far to take things and when things are getting out of hand.
It’s a shame because we look everywhere for a manual or some kind of guild lines on how to protect our children, but the truth is that we can’t always protect them and no matter how good a parent is, it can be a tragedy. It can still hit, but what we can do is instill good moral values in our children and only hope for the best.