The Safety Mom Chronicles

Give Someone A Safety Tip for Mother's Day and Possibly Save a Life!

Happy Mother's Day to all the amazing moms out there!  Motherhood is a special club and the lifetime membership  fee is pretty high - your heart and soul - but we all give it willingly.  It is a club where this is no discrimination and we gladly welcome new members.   There is no secret handshake or code word but there is a secret power we all acquire - mother's intuition.  It is the most supportive club I have ever belonged to and my personal goal is to pass along wisdom gained along the way to new members.  And it's a club filled with the greatest joys as well as sorrows.  I was elated to become a part of the club in 1997 with the birth of my son Connor.  Sadly, my membership was "rescinded" a mere four months later when he died of Sudden Infant Death Sydrome.  I instantly fell into this strange gap in which my childless friends could not completely relate to my pain yet my friends with children were almost afraid to be around me lest my misfortune somehow rubbed off on them.  I had the good fortune of become a full fledged member once again a year later when my second son Spencer was born.  From that moment on I made it my mission to help in some way spare other moms the grief I experienced.  I devoted my life to child health and safety and became The Safety Mom.  Every day I interview experts, review information and educate myself on the many safety topic effecting our kids and pass this along to both new and "veteran" moms. 

Sadly, all too often, we never dream that tragedy will strike our children.  Unfortunately it does and I frequently hear from grief stricken moms saying "if only I knew."  This Mother's Day, let's reach out to our sister members in the most amazing club we will ever have the privilege of belonging to.  Pass along one safety tip that you have learned that could potentially save another child's life.  It could be about the importance of putting a fence around a pool, the warning signs of teen depression, the benefits of banking a baby's umbilical cord blood or the dangers facing our children on the Internet.  Childhood accidents are the leading cause of death for children 1 - 14 years of age.  Let's work together to make this statistic obsolete.  Let's start a movement to save our children and pay it forward!  What tip can you pass along?  I will soon be starting a discussion board on my site, thesafetymom.com so we can all learn from each other.  Happy Mother's Day to all!

Warning of School Threat Spread By Text - Help or Hystera?

There was an article on the cover of USA Today this morning about the power of text messaging in spreading rumors about potential school violence.  Apparently in the past several months many schools have seen wide spread absenteeism after students had used text messages to spread warnings about potential campus shooters, bomb threats and the like. 

As the article states, in nine out of ten times, these threats are unfounded but do you really want to take the chance of being that tenth one?  Schools are trying to respond rapidly when they learn of these texting waves by holding assemblies and sending automated phone messages to parents to assure them of the school's safety.  But once these text messages take off it's hard to control and schools are seeing, at times, two-thirds of their student body absent on a particular day in which violence has been threatened.  The article quoted a security expert who noted that "Mom finds out about it faster than the superintendent, the school board or even the building principal."

While this can be a problem I'm not sure it really bothers me.  Unfortunately we have seen too many times where a school has not acted quickly enough when they have learned of a planned attack.  As a Mom I want to be the one to make the decision whether to send my child to school if there is a threat of violence.   In this day and age with so many campus shootings it's difficult to predict what will happen.  Too often we hear friends of a gunman say that they had heard rumors something was going to happen.  While we can't live in a state of fear or overreact, I want to be the one to decide what I think is credible and whether I feel it's safe for my child to go to school. 

How do you feel?  Do you think the wave of texting is helping moms or causing hysteria?  What would you do if you learned of a threat that has occurred at your child's school?