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For many of us, our families are the most important thing in the world. The current situation in the world has made many of us bring our families even closer and work even harder to keep them safe from harm. You can never predict what might be around the corner, but you can be prepared. Preparation can help to keep your family protected and safe.
Set A Budget
It might sound obvious, but financial security is a big part of protecting your family. Careers and health can all change without warning, so you can’t always be sure of your income. If you set a budget, you can make sure you pay your current bills and have enough spare to save for future problems. If something does happen, you’ll have savings ready to help you, even if you or your spouse can’t work for a while.
Share With Your Kids
As well as agreeing on and sticking to a budget, it’s a good idea to talk to your children about your money choices. You don’t want to worry them or cause them to feel frightened about not having money, but instead, want them to learn to value money. Talk to them honestly about why you choose not to spend money, and about why you have a budget. These conversations can help your children to learn about money and build good money habits for their own adulthood.
Start A College Fund
Education is very important. A good education can help to open more doors for your child as they grow. The cost can be a hurdle to a good education, though. As soon as you have children, start a savings account for their future learning. Once they’re old enough to choose where they want to study, you will have a good amount of savings ready to assist with school fees, accommodation costs, or the costs of any books or equipment. Save now to help them to have more choices later.
Establish Home Safety
If you’re going to protect your family, you need to keep your home well-secured too. What this means will vary depending on where you live. If you live somewhere that suffers from floods or earthquakes, you need to ready your home to deal with them. Make a plan and a checklist so you can respond quickly if you ever need to.
Secure your doors and windows with locks and keeping them in good repair. Lock doors and windows at night or whenever you leave your home. Don’t forget to lock garden gates, garage doors, and shed doors as well. You might want to consider a home security system and alarms.
You must have home insurance, so your home and belongings are protected in the event of theft or damage.
Get Life Insurance
Nobody wants to consider it, but we all need to think about what might happen to our family when we’re no longer with them. To provide for your children and your spouse, you should arrange both a will and life insurance. This gives you some peace of mind that if the worst were to happen to you, your family won’t have to worry about money. Life insurance can be used to cover funeral costs or to cushion the loss of your earnings.
Whether you have a family history of illness, worry about car accidents, or have a dangerous job, it’s a good idea to consider how you can provide for your family even after you’re gone.
Keep Tabs On Their Social Media
As they reach their teen years, at some point, your children are likely to want to set up social media accounts. When you agree that they’re responsible enough, you should do your own research into different social media channels, so you know what you’re agreeing to let them use. It could be smart to set up accounts of your own so you can be familiar with the platforms. You can’t keep your child safe from the risks of these sites if you don’t know what they are.
If you don’t already have them, open your own accounts, so you can friend or follow your kids. They might not be too thrilled about this, but it should encourage them to think about what they post. If you do this, check in on them occasionally, but don’t interact with everything, or they might feel spied on.
When they make accounts, make sure they have thought about their privacy and location settings. Children might not realize the danger of things like this, so make sure they aren’t accidentally telling the world where they are.
Make Use Of Privacy and Parental Settings On The Computer
Parental filters might sound restrictive to your child but discuss with them what these filters actually mean. Most children have no plans to try to access the kind of content you’d rather they didn’t get at, but you can use filters to protect them from being sent or linked to things that would cause them distress. Parental settings can also be used to limit the amount of time spent online, which can help with focusing on homework.
Explain to your children that these restrictions are to keep them safe, not to limit them and what they can do.
Teach Them That The Internet Is Forever
The internet can be a useful tool for children, for help with their homework and for entertainment, but it does have an unpleasant side.
Have a chat with your kids about how the internet works, and discuss examples of other teenagers who went viral for the wrong reasons or ended up on the receiving end of a backlash online.
They must know that what they share now can last forever online, and can be changed and boosted by other people. Once a post or a photo has been shared online, they don’t have ownership over it anymore, and can’t predict where it might end up.
Copyright law around social media is complex, so talk about sharing photos and how they could be taken or changed. It’s also smart to remind them that employers often look up candidates on social media, so when the time comes for job hunting, a foolish post made now could come back to haunt them and stop them from getting a job.
Make Gaming Safe
Gaming has changed a lot over the last few years, and online gaming has become a big part of gaming. Most games can be played online, with friends and strangers.
Online gaming can turn unpleasant, with the desire to win turning harmless trash talk into cyberbullying or even online abuse. Make sure that your child knows that this can happen, and what they need to do if they encounter bullying or other nasty behavior while they’re playing games. You should also be prepared to respond if you realize your child is the online bully.
You might think your precious baby isn’t capable of bullying someone, but gaming on the internet can quickly become heated, so you must be ready to punish this behavior as soon as you see any signs of it.
Teach Children How To Behave While Out and About
Crime against young children is very uncommon, but it’s important to make sure your children, even young kids, know how to keep safe. When you have these discussions, be careful to keep things age-appropriate so kids understand how to look after themselves, but aren’t scared by them and end up worrying that someone is going to hurt them.
Teach your children to never speak to strangers when you’re not around, and to never walk away with someone they don’t know, even if they tell them that you sent them. Encourage open discussion, so they won’t keep it a secret from you if a stranger does approach them.
If your child has to travel without you for some reason, such as getting the bus to school, teach them to sit near other families. If they’ll have to use an elevator on their travels, teach them to only get in with friends and to not feel stupid if something in there makes them uncomfortable and they want to get out.
All children should know what to do if they get lost in public. Teach them to ask for help from a police officer, someone working in a shop, or another grown-up with children. You should also teach them your address and phone number and get them to memorize it. This way, if they do get lost, they’ll be able to tell the person who helps them how to reach you.
When out with your young children, keep them within your eyeline, or within sight of another adult that you trust. Just in case, always agree on a meeting point to use if you do get split up by mistake. Always go with your child into public toilets.
Teaching your child some simple rules to live by, you can help them to stay safe wherever they are.
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