16 Steps Parents Can Take Toward a Safer, Less Stressful Halloween

Halloween is supposed to be a spooky day. With a few precautions you can help keep it from being a scary day.

Worrying about the dangers of tricking-or-treating, carving pumpkins, and candy consumption leaves many parents anxious about the year’s most haunted holiday. Follow our steps to have an enjoyable Halloween with just the right amount of spooky.

Steps Parents Can Take Toward a Safer Halloween

Carving Pumpkins

Don’t use kitchen knives. Instead use utensils designed to carve pumpkin. They are safer and easier for kids to use. (Carving Tip: Cut from the bottom so that it is easier to clean the pumpkin and add your lighting.)

Let little kids do the scooping. Younger kids that are too young to carve will enjoy getting sticky by pulling out the innards of their pumpkin.

Decorate instead of carve. Younger kids that aren’t old enough to carve can draw faces on their pumpkin with markers and/or decorate with colorful tape, paint, or accessories.

Getting Dressed Up

Look for flame resistant costumes. Before purchase, check costume tags and ensure that all material is flame resistant. This also goes for accessories, wigs, and capes.

Make your kids glow in the dark. Red Tricycle suggests a few fun ways to make Halloween costumes visible at night.

Add reflective tape to treat buckets and backs of shoes. (Try Duct Tape’s heavy duty glow in the dark roll.)
Dress kids with LED accessories and glow stick jewelry such as flashing headbands, bracelets, and necklaces.
Embellish costumes with iron-on reflective decals and patches.

Test make-up before applying. Test out a dab of make-up a few nights before Halloween to make sure the make-up doesn’t irritate your child’s skin.

Trick-or-Treating

Decide if your kids are mature enough to trick-or-treat without you. According to Safekids.org, children under the age of 12 should not trick-or-treat alone at night without adult supervision. But age isn’t always an indicator of a kid’s maturity level, so decide based on your kid’s attitude and sensibility if they are ready to trick-or-treat on their own.

Teach kids how to cross the street safely. Go over safety rules for crossing streets:

Always cross at street corners and crosswalks.
Look left, right, and left again before you cross. Keep looking as you cross.
When a driver stops or slows to allow you to cross the street, make eye contact to ensure that they see you.
Don’t look at your phone while crossing the street.

Create a route. Look at a map and create a map for your child to follow while trick-or-treating. Create a route that limits the number of times kids need to cross busy streets. Direct the route so that it crosses familiar territory and homes of known family or friends (for emergencies).

Check-ins. Set times and places for check-ins. You can use MamaBear app to allow for easy, one-click check-ins or to set automatic alerts for when your kids reach certain destinations.

Related: How to Receive Automatic Check-ins With MamaBear

Discuss stranger danger. Review situations that your children should avoid while trick-or-treating.

Don’t approach houses that don’t have lights on.
Never ever accept an invitation to go into a house, shed, haunted house, or any type of obstructed or concealed location.
Never accept a ride from a stranger.

Make an emergency plan. Discuss safe places to stop (homes of family or friends) along the way that includes a fully charged phone battery.

Eating Candy

Give your kids a snack before they go trick-or-treating. This will make kids less likely to want to eat along the way (and combat crankiness).

Tell kids to wait to dig in. Kids will want to dig into their candy while on the road, but tell them to wait. Explain to them that you need to inspect the candy before indulge.

Teach them what is safe to eat. If you know your kids won’t wait, teach them to only eat sealed, commercially-wrapped candies from well-known family and friends. Teach them how to inspect the wrappers to make sure candy is safe.

Portion candy and enjoy Halloween in November. Limit the amount of candy that kids can eat per day or week. Explain to them that this will let Halloween last far into November.

Halloween should be an enjoyable time for spooky, family fun. Go through these tips with your kids and use the MamaBear Family Safety app to ensure that this year’s Halloween is spooky, but never scary for parents and kids. MamaBear Family Safety app is available for both iPhone and Android devices.

October 23, 2014October 23, 2014

Snappening: What Snapchat’s Third Party Hack Means for Our Kids

In the wake of celebrity iCloud security breaches came another digital information privacy hack. Only this time it’s not celebrity information that was shared with strangers online; it was our children’s.

In mid-October, The Pirate Bay posted almost 98,000 files that included 13GB of photos and videos originally sent through the social media app Snapchat, according to Mashable.

Social media journalists called the leak the “Snappening,” and as parents, we need to be familiar with what this privacy leak means for our children.

What Information Was Released?

Over half of Snapchat’s users are between the ages of 13 and 17, which means the hacked content was generated primarily by children.

Snapchat’s users often send and receive private photos and videos via the social media app. They feel safe sharing private information through the app because it is designed to delete information after a certain amount of time or alert the user that the image has been saved (if another user captures the image via screenshot).

This application feature leads many teens and kids tend to think Snapchat is a secure place to share private information they normally wouldn’t share. That private information often includes racy, nude, or illicit images.

How Did the Information Get Out?

Snapchat’s servers were not hacked, and the images and videos were not taken out of their database. They were access through a third-party site called Snapsaved.com.

Snapsaved allowed users to save and access their snaps online, which goes against the main principle of Snapchat’s program. On Snapsaved, images and videos can be saved without the sender’s knowledge, also unlike Snapchat’s app.

The third party app has since taken down its site and released the following statement via their Facebook page, “As soon as we discovered the breach in our systems, we immediately deleted the entire website and the database associated with it. As far as we can tell, the breach has effected [sic] 500MB of images, and 0 personal information from the database.”

So What Does This Mean for Our Kids?

There have been mixed reports about whether or not the leaked content included illicit images of children. But the big message here is that this should be a warning.

Related: Helping Your Teen be Safe on Social Media

Kids need to understand that the information they share online is not as private as they think. Even when shared on sites that seem secure, information may still be leaked. Before they capture, send, or share an image, our kids need to consider the possibility that the image may be shared without their consent. They should always think before posting anything personal or reputation damaging.

Hackers are out to prove that they can access information that is off limits, and they don’t care if the information is from celebrities, ordinary people, or our children.

As parents, it is our job to teach our children about the danger of oversharing on social sites and to monitor the way our children are using those sites. Learn how MamaBear Family Safety App can you help connect with your kids on their social media accounts.

October 21, 2014October 21, 2014

POV Swap: The Ideal Parent and the Ideal Coach

This is a collaborative article written by TeamSnap and MamaBear

Sometimes it can be hard to see things from the eyes of another. You might think you have it all figured out, but so does the other guy. But especially when it comes to dealing with someone involved with your children, like coaches or teachers, it’s important to keep their point of view in mind. And of course, they should try to do the same!

With that idea, TeamSnap and MamaBear decided to pull a “Freaky Friday” sort of swap, with MamaBear exploring what a parent’s idea of an ideal coach is and TeamSnap expounding on the coach’s idea of what the ideal sports parent is.

From the Parent’s Point of View: The Ideal Sports Coach

Coaches are role models, mentor figures and advisors — sometimes for life, sometimes only for a season — but they sure do make an impression on our kids. Our active, on-the-go MamaBear families rely on their kids’ coaches to help shape the meaning of hard work, camaraderie and reliability. Here are our top three observations of an ideal sports coach.

Inspire. The team talk at the end of every game doesn’t have to be a Jimmy V. tearjerker, but there’s nothing more motivating than a good ‘ol coach pep talk. Certain phrases from coaches will be carried on and used in our kids’ lives well beyond playing sports. The influence coaches have to inspire determination can be more meaningful than realized.
Communicate on level. The instruction from a coach to “back up” could mean a couple of things to a 9 year old up to the plate in a baseball game. Step further back in the box toward the catcher? Take a step away from the plate? Rather than continue restating “back up” with no real response from the player, give more detail, realize they don’t understand what you’re instructing and try another approach. Every kid comprehends instruction differently.
Have Fun. We’ve all seen the frustrated coach yelling, throwing his hat to the ground or storming off the field. The usual parent sentiment is, “Can’t they just have some fun?” Really. Lighten up. Instruction and constructive feedback will make the game more fun for everyone. Patience, self-awareness and a smile with a thumbs-up will go a long way.

It takes a village to raise kids — parents, extended family, friends, coaches and MamaBear, too. We save you time and get you in the know with notifications about your kids’ daily activity in social media and provide peace of mind with location updates, all in an effort to get you talking about responsibility, safety and independence.

From the Coach’s Point of View: The Ideal Sports Parent

We all know what “bad” sports parents are like. The stereotype is portrayed on TV, in movies, and we all see our fair share of them in person, too. But what do “good” sports parents look like?

Ideal sports parents vary depending on the age group, the team and the coach, of course, but they all have a few characteristics in common. We took a look at our more than 7 million users here at TeamSnap, an online and mobile tool for managing sports teams, and came up with three of the best sports parents behavior:

They offer to help. We all know it’s easier to criticize than to jump in and lend assistance. Ideal sports parents know this and not only offer their opinion but also their time, dedication and resources. Ideal sports parents volunteer to host the end-of-season BBQ. They volunteer for drink duty (or better yet, they volunteer to manage drink duty assignments using team management software). They offer their SUV for carpool runs. They understand that the coaches (often volunteers themselves) can’t do it all on their own, and they actively step up.
They’re responsive. Every coach’s pet peeve is asking the same question a million times. Whether it’s checking to see who can make the game, asking parents to pay team dues or asking parents to update their contact information, coaches would rather be actually coaching than managing these administrative tasks. Luckily, sport team management software now exists to automate many of these tasks, but it doesn’t work if parents don’t respond! Ideal sports parents get their forms in on time, they update their kids’ availability status online or however it’s required, and they answer questions when asked … the first time!
They control their emotions. Parenting is, by nature, an emotional experience. You want to guard your kids from anything that might hurt them and ensure they’re getting the best experiences they can from life. Keeping those emotions in check, especially in front of the kids, is an absolute must for the ideal sports parent though. Not only are confrontations between parents and coaches or parents and refs or even parents and other parents embarrassing for the child, they also undermine the authority of the ref or the coach, confusing kids about who they should listen to during a game or at practice. Surely, part of the reason you encouraged your child to join a team is to teach teamwork and responsibility, so exhibit those qualities yourself from the sidelines!

Next time you’re asked to do something by the coach or attending your child’s game, ask yourself, am I doing all I can to be the “ideal sports parent”? And check out the TeamSnap youth sports blog and podcast for more on the sports parent experience.

Image Credit: Bigstock

October 10, 2014October 10, 2014

Dangers of Talking to Strangers Online

When you see your child texting or chatting online, you may assume they are communicating with friends and family. But that may not always be the case.

A study from Cox Communications found that 69% of teens regularly receive personal messages online from strangers. Many parents may be unaware of this because only 21% of teens who receive messages from strangers tell a trusted adult.

Kids aren’t talking about encounters with online strangers, but parents need to.

Know the Facts

If you think your child is safe from online stranger solicitation, you are wrong. The San Diego District Attorney (SDDA) reported that over 45 million children ages 10-17 use the Internet, and among them:

close to 60% of teens have received an e-mail or instant message from a stranger, and half have communicated back
one in five has been sexually solicited

The odds that your child or teen has encountered a solicitation from a stranger online are high, and there is also a chance that those messages were inappropriate or lewd.

Restrict Stranger Chat Sites

There are a few social sites that promote chatting with strangers. Parents should familiarize themselves with those sites so they can recognize if their children are using them.

Omegle – Randomly connects users with strangers and allows them to chat via text or video chat. It is known to often include sexual material.
Imeetzu – Randomly connects users with strangers, requires no registration, and permits text, video, and group chats.
Tohla – Opens chat windows within the site for chatting one-on-one with strangers.
Bazoocam – Is an international chat site that pairs users with strangers for video chat sessions.

Parents should consider banning these sites, so their children fully understand the danger associated with communicating through these channels.

Educate Yourself on Chat Lingo

Because some kids and teens don’t fully understand the dangers of talking to strangers online, they may engage in this behavior. If they know you disapprove, they may attempt to hide it. So educate yourself on the chat lingo they may use to hide their conversations.

ChatSlang has a full list of terms that parents should recognize. Among them:

9 or C9 – Parent in room
CD9 – Parents are watching
SPROS – Stop parents reading over shoulder
KPC – Keeping parents clueless
ASLP – Age/Sex/Location/Picture

These are only a few of the acronyms kids use to attempt to keep their parents in the dark. So keep an eye out for any unusual acronyms and question your child if you don’t understand their messages.

Take Safety Precautions

Educating yourself on the dangers of online stranger encounters is the first step in protecting you kids. The next step is educating your kids, and that means talking to them about it.

Related: Protecting Kids from Internet Stranger Danger

The SDDA reports that, “71% of parents stop supervising Internet use by their children after the age of 14, yet 72% of all Internet-related missing children cases involve children who are 15 years of age or older.”

It’s important to continue to protect and educate your children even into their teens. Keep lines of communication open so they feel comfortable coming to you in the event a stranger contacts them online, and stay connect with apps like MamaBear Family Safety (available for iPhones and Andriods) that helps you see who is talking to your kids in social media environments.