Home Security Directory

Posts Tagged ‘Work’

Parents, quite simply, worry about their children. They worry about how they’re doing in school, they worry about whether or not they have enough friends, and they worry about their futures, whether their children are infants or teenagers. While it’s not bad for parents to worry, raising a child is stressful enough without fretting over everything.

One of the biggest concerns for parents, especially working parents, is the safety of their unsupervised children while they’re at work. It’s a fact of fast-paced modern American life that parents can’t always be home to greet their children from school, and no matter how responsible and capable your child is, each day can be a little nerve-wracking. There’s already enough guilt associated with the idea of “latch-key kids” for parents who simply don’t have the time or the money to do it all. But no matter how many times a child comes home alone, it doesn’t make the experience any easier.

Educating your child with a few simple tips should make their arriving home alone safer and more worry-free for both child and parent. It’s important to teach your child many of the things you already use as common sense for home security. When he’s arriving home, caution him to pay attention to the house. Is the front door hanging wide open? Does a window look broken? Teach her to go to a trusted neighbor’s house and call you from there if anything looks suspicious or amiss.

It’s also very important for your child’s safety to teach him what to do or say when home alone. Make sure that they don’t answer the door if there is no one else in the house, and decide whether or not you want them to answer the phone or allow the answering machine to pick up. If you give them permission to answer the phone, stress the importance of not saying that you aren’t home, but rather, that you can’t come to the phone. It’s also very important that your child stay indoors when he or she is home alone. In addition to the red flag it raises for a child to be playing alone in the yard, there’s also the chance of getting accidentally locked out of the house, an unpleasant experience for anyone, but something particularly dramatic for a youngster.

If parents have home security systems installed in their homes, it’s very important to teach your children how to turn the home alarm on and off. Certain systems even have voice monitoring capabilities, which means that it’s possible to check in to make sure not only that your child has successfully armed or re-armed the system, but that he or she has safely made it into the home. If there’s a phone number to call in the event of a false alarm, be sure to share it with your child and maybe keep it written next to the alarm keypad. Spend a great deal of time checking that your child knows all of the home alarm passwords and emphasize that they are not to be shared with anyone. For even more peace of mind, also ensure that your child has memorized your cell and work phone numbers, as well as the phone number and address of at least one trustworthy adult who lives nearby in case of an emergency.