Safe Search Kids - Education, Parenting, Internet Safety for All

Being stuck at home for weeks in a time when everything feels uncertain and out of control can be mood-dipping experience. We all want to feel safe and hopeful for tomorrow, Fortunately, there are practical things we can all do to maintain a positive attitude.

Anxiety doesn’t have to be your friend, just as you don’t have to let loneliness move in to be your roommate or neighbor. With a focus on mood-boosting activities we will be able to keep our sanity through long periods of time at home.

Psychologists say that it may be possible to beat depression, anxiety, and loneliness through physical exercise. According to a study that was published by JAMA Psychiatry in January 2020, regular physical activity can independently alleviate depression disorder and boost a person’s overall mood.

For students in school, there is the added benefits that exercise brings to the brain.  More oxygen, more blood flow, and the simple fact that a break from braining draining studies is healthy to avoid burnout.

But how exactly does exercising boost our mood, especially while home-isolated? Here is how:

1.  It is a Good Excuse to get Natural Light Exposure

Increased exposure to natural light will boost your energy and mood levels, and consequently, improve your sleep and overall quality of life. That is why people who stay indoors for too long suffer irritability, distraction, and depression. Unfortunately, we aren’t getting enough natural light these day, especially for those living in harsh winter climates.

Outdoor exercising is one of the few valid reasons for anyone to get out these days. So, if you have space on your balcony, backyard, or if you live in a scarcely-populated neighborhood, go out there and run. Do all forms of cardio and get your heart racing. If you can’t go to far from home, ride a bicycle around your garden for an hour daily. It is a great way not just to burn fat and lose weight but to boost your spirits as well.

Riding a bike is something then entire family can enjoy together outdoors.  If you have kids who are just learning how to ride, teaching them is an activity in itself. 

2.  Helps You Beat Insomnia

Being stuck indoors means that everyone is now getting the time to sleep during the day. The disadvantage of that: Severe insomnia for people who struggle to catch sleep at night. One of the effects of insufficient sleep at night is lowered spirits during the day. The good thing is that studies point to the possibilities of regular exercise being a remedy for severe insomnia. Here are 2 arguments in support of this claim:

• Intense physical activity has undisputed body-heating effects. When you increase your body temperature by exercising a few hours to bedtime, your body reacts by lowering its temperature back to normal. That post-exercise temperature dip may make you fall asleep faster.

• Most people with severe insomnia suffer from anxiety and depression. Exercising is a proven way of alleviating these symptoms so you sleep better.

3.  It makes you drink more water

Research has shown that people who drink at least 8 glasses of water per day are calmer, more content, and have way lesser physical and mental fatigue compared to people who intake less than 6 glasses per day. That is reliable evidence that drinking more water might result in a better mood.

But then, drinking water regularly might seem like extra work for people who aren’t keen on their hydration needs. That is where physical exercise comes in. When you work out, you will always feel the urge to drink more water and, knowingly or not, you will fundamentally be boosting your mood.

4.  Helps you cultivate healthy relationships

Many couples are fighting all the time because for the first time since they have known each other, they are now spending 24 hours together, up from 3-5 hours tops on normal days. When you fight, your mood deteriorates. When you work out together as a couple or as a family, your mood improves.

5.  It is a good way of alleviating emotional exhaustion

Emotional exhaustion results from prolonged stress. Most people are feeling emotionally worn-out and drained due to the uncertainties shared by people worldwide. People are feeling trapped; it seems like no one is in control of their lives or careers anymore.

Increased physical activity raises endorphins and serotonin levels in your body, which in turn can boost your emotional state. It helps take your mind off the news and the constant feeling of hopelessness.

Conclusion

Physical inactivity during this time can have detrimental impacts on both your mental and physical health. Make a point of exercising for at least 30 minutes per day, especially given that there are plenty of at-home workout ideas online. What’s more, even after the quarantine season is over, you will have developed a healthy fitness routine for the rest of your life.

Encouraging Your Kids Through Seasonal Affective Disorder

With eLearning on the rise, it’s important to keep our kids’ brains moving. Doing so will help them to perform at their best given the challenges eLearning can present. It will also help them relax as they spend more time at home. Healthy eating can help in many other ways as well.

Health agencies, childcare organizations, and child-friendly brands always remind parents and guardians to encourage kids to eat nutritious foods. For instance, the World Health Organization (WHO) sets child nutrition guidelines, and The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend a healthy eating pattern for people aged two years and above.

Now more than ever, parents must ensure that their children are taking nutrient-dense foods to ensure they grow healthy, strong, and happy. But many parents face a struggle in feeding healthy foods to their children. Luckily, food experts like Serenity Kids share valuable information with parents online, such as choosing healthy snacks for picky eaters.

Since children are getting out less, their immune system is vulnerable. During winter months, we receive less Vitamin D, exercise less, and can even go a little stir-crazy. With nutrient-packed meals and snacks, your children can be a little more at ease in their new, but still temporary, full-time environment.

Furthermore, this is a great time to get creative in the kitchen. Choose foods that stimulate child development. Select ingredients wisely and be careful not to frivolously fill your shopping cart with just any food. Make a list, and limit the number of times you visit the grocery store to prevent bringing back the virus to your children.

You can also make a menu list, food journal, or cheat sheet that includes valuable information about your children’s special food preferences. Take note of the healthy food recipes you cook that they like the best, allowing you to create more versions and serve them the next time without boring your kids.

Additionally, read or watch cooking techniques and recommendations from chefs, nutritionists, and pediatricians, and note them in your journal. This can help you learn creative ways to make vegetables, fruits, grains, and other nutritious foods look interesting and appetizing. That way, you can improve your food preparation skills and boost your children’s healthy eating patterns.

Tasty meals can help fade the negative stigma most children have surrounding nutritional eats, and can even go on to make them prefer fruits and vegetables rather than being resilient to them. Here’s what you can do:

When cooking at home with your kids, be intentional about meal prepping and portion control. It’s best to avoid highly processed snacks such as cookies, crackers, chips, and canned foods containing high-sodium and high-fructose corn syrup. Bake your own sweets using natural ingredients.  Low-fat popcorn and nuts make great mid-day snacks; and for dinner, pairing pasta or rice with a protein, such as fish, can fill your little ones’ bellies for much longer.

Lastly, be aware of the “Pandemic Pantry,” the list of items shopped are stockpiling. These include canned foods, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and bottled water. Buying a water filter can help alleviate the purchasing of bottled water, and given the recent governmental policies, we need not fear being disconnected from your water supply while under quarantine – even if bills begin to pile up.

Taking the opportunity to show your kids healthy eating habits can benefit them now, and also influence them to continue a great diet post-quarantine. If you read the infographic below, you can gain more information on how to eat healthy. Take care, be safe, and enjoy your extra family time.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of 7.5 hours per day in front of screens.  It may be on social media or watching TV or playing videos games.  Even adults will agree that the hours “fly by” when engaging with the digital world.  Don’t worry, the 7 Day Digital Detox is not asking you to go offline for 7 Days.

Rather, it’s 7 days of tech-free family activities and conversation starters delivered to your inbox.   It’s a chance for your family to reconnect without looking at a screen.  Life is about balance.  It’s about developing healthy habits that doesn’t necessarily mean stopping something you love to do altogether.

Why The Digital Detox?

It’s not uncommon to see a group of teens sitting together, each of them on their phones on social media or texting, but none of them interacting with each other.  The same thing happens with families at home.  Let’s face it.  Watching TV kills time.  Surfing the web or scroll posts on social media can eat up hours. The temptation for distraction from life is great but ‘so called’ relaxing time can also lead to online burnout.

There is also the time reading online news, most of which is negative. It can bring a person down without a balance of reading stories that are positive and uplifting.

No one denies the benefits of being able to keep in touch with family and friends miles away, especially in this time of social distancing.  But even when you look at the hours we spend on screens, how much of it is actually having a digital conversation compared with reading and viewing information in silence.   Studies have claimed too much screen time can cause social and family dysfunction, as well as development delays and depression.

Human Interaction Takes Planning

If we don’t set time aside to do things as a family, it won’t happen.  It’s the difference between cooking dinner and having family members just take their food from the stove to eat wherever they like, or saying “tonight, we’re going to have a sit-down meal together”.  It takes a simple commitment.  A meal together is one activity a family can do to have a conversation, as long as everyone doesn’t bring their phones to the table.

Planning to do something can be easy to talk about.  It’s much more difficult to follow through on unless at time is set.  For example, at 5 o’clock today we’re all going for a walk.  Friday nights are game night.  Keep it interesting by exploring fresh new activities like new language games the whole family can enjoy.   Or how about a family drive to a scenic outdoor viewpoint in your local area.

Get ideas for activities and conversations starters
to bond with your family without tech!

And there’s nothing wrong with a movie night.  True, it’s more time in front of a screen but can be a fun time to spend time together compared with everyone just watching their own favorite show in solitude.  The same can be said for videos games done together on one screen as a family. It’s certainly better than when kids individually looking at their screens with no interaction with those around them.

As mentioned, it’s not about eliminating screen time, only reducing screen time it in our daily lives while connecting in a personal way with our family.  Puzzles anyone?  It may not be everyone’s preference.  In that case, break up your activities in groups.  Some work on a puzzle while others play a game or build a connectable toy.

You can also use the time to evaluate if there are any online accounts you don’t really need.  Detoxing your digital life can also mean reclaiming your online privacy and doing away with excess use to simplify your digital management.

So why not give it a try?

Sign up for the 7 Day Digital Detox and you’ll receive one email per day for 7 days.  Each email will consist of fun ideas to help you reconnect as a family in fun way.

Start Your Free Digital Detox Here!

The Digital Detox is inspired by the same parental control software company that developed Covenant Eyes, the program that also teaches kids how to be responsible internet users. Screen time monitoring is just one of the features that parental controls offer, in addition to preventing the much worse consequences of when kids come into contact with explicit material online.

Any attempt to reduce screen time, avoid screen time addiction, or protect families from harm online begins with a conversation.  The 7 Day Digital Detox is great way to open the lines of communication between family members so that having those important conversations happen naturally.

With the continued integration of digital tools in education, it’s more important than ever to carefully consider the implications of transferring student data between parents, teachers, and administrators. Educational technology is now a standard across classrooms—so what exactly does that mean for our students?

Risk of Student Data Breaches

Between 2022 and 2023, the number of student data breaches continued to rise, highlighting the growing risks associated with educational technology. In higher education specifically, attacks were up 70 percent.

In the most severe cases, students’ personally identifiable information (PII) has been sold on the dark web.  Even on a small scale, these breaches mean the potential for hackers to decode passwords. In these cases, student’s accounts are compromised and this can lead to targeted cyberbullying.

Lengthier Education Records

Years ago, the extent of student data was education records stuffed into file cabinets. Oftentimes, those records were lost or tampered with. Ultimately, they didn’t follow students as far as education records will today. Solidified on the web, students have little room for mistakes in the current climate.

It’s important to consider these factors when employing new chatrooms or technology mediums in classrooms. Ensuring all edtech helps, instead of hinders, student’s futures should be an educator’s number one priority.

Responsible Student Data Privacy in the Classroom

Student data privacy laws on a federal and state level monitor some of these potential risks on a micro-level. As an educator, though, you must take proactive measures to protect student data privacy. Consider the following when implementing education technology in digital and physical classrooms:

• Follow FERPA Sherpa: Use resources available from the government to understand the concerns with edtech in the classroom.

• Read the privacy policy: Before having students visit a website, make sure you read the privacy policy thoroughly. It may indicate it sells data to third parties, or worse, does not have a privacy policy in place at all.

• Follow the school’s approved list: Districts and schools will have an approved list of companies and websites to use in the classroom. Seek out this approval before asking students to use a program or website.

• Explain best practices: Explain best practices for safe web use to your students, and lead by example. Inform them of the dangers of sharing personal information online and not to believe everything they read online.

• Avoid clickwrap agreements: If a website in question has a clickwrap agreement, avoid using it in the classroom. These agreements are data-controlling and have free use of information used on their site.

• Look for secure sites: the “s” in ‘https’ signifies that a webpage is encrypted. Any site where students need to log in to an account should be encrypted.

The advancement of tech in education can be a benefit for efficient, personalized learning, but it’s important to take extra measures to protect the new influx of data. With proper vetting of websites, technologies, and platforms; technology can be an advantage for students, parents, and teachers.  Learn what types of personal data parents should protect.

Practice Physical Security Measures

Physical security within the context of data privacy refers to the protection of physical devices that can be compromised by someone within a workplace or school.

If teachers or students fail to securely log off a computer containing personal information, it becomes a target for unauthorized access when they step away. This risk also exists at home, where a visitor could steal personal information if your phone or laptop is not password-protected. Additionally, devices themselves can be stolen.

Data security is about more than just protection from online cyber threats.

To protect yourself, avoid leaving devices in a vehicle when traveling. In busy areas, ensure your devices are safe in a bag or kept out of sight. Always keep devices password-protected and enable secure cloud backups so you can remotely wipe a device without losing your data.  These precautionary steps provide users with better control over sensitive information that could otherwise be accessed by someone physically present.

Personal Device Privacy

Do you really want someone to use your phone to record what you say without you knowing? Do you really want strangers looking at all your pictures and texts? Then you better learn about SMALL PRINT. How about strangers selling your pictures and texts to other people? Or following everything you do online?

Of course, secretly peeking into your life is wrong. Still, you probably clicked on a box that gave someone you don’t know permission to do just that.

Small Print for Smaller Humans

Whenever you activate a phone or play a computer game or download an app, you see itsy bitsy print at the bottom of the pages. Those tiny words are filled with things that you need to check off before you can use your new computer or play that new game.  Those words can be so small that you probably can’t even read them.

If you could read them, they’d sound like gibberish. Many adults with years of education have trouble understanding what those weird words mean. Your parents should look at any small print that you check off, but they might have problems figuring out what they say. What people do know is that when you check the “AGREED” box, you give strangers permission to do scary things.

Do you:

1. Use a web browser?
2. Play games online?
3. Download apps to your phone or computer?
4. Upload pictures for your friends to see?
5. Store pictures or text in a cloud?

If you do, then here is a list of just some of the things that you have probably agreed to let strangers do:

• turn your video and audio recorders on
• take and use your pictures and videos
• turn your gaming machine off forever
• track everything you do online and share or sell your activity
• prevent you or your parents from legally stopping people from sharing details from your lives.

Small print is tricky. Teams of well-trained lawyers spend thousands of hours working on every little word. All that time and all those brains are there to protect the big companies that you use online. It’s up to you and your parents to protect YOU.

Make a point of looking for small print. Grab a bunch of your friends and see if all of you can figure out exactly what you agree to when you click that little box. You will be surprised.