Are The Kids Behaving Nicely At School? Find Out By Following These Tips

This will be a brief guide to ensuring your children are keeping healthy and safe habits while at school. Starting with their eating habits and how you can strike a deal with them so they eat a healthy lunch most days but still get to enjoy an occasional treat, we will look at keeping a balanced diet.

Next, we will explore taking precautions to ensure they are not smoking and vaping at school, including asking the school to install vape detectors.

Finally, we will look at managing their motor vehicle use and deterring reckless driving.

Eating

Do you send your child to school with money for food or a healthy packed lunch made at home? You might think that the latter is clearly the more healthy option, and ensures that your son or daughter is maintaining a balanced diet. However, this may not be the case. Your child could well be swapping or binning their carefully packed lunch in favor of tasty treats from the store or someone else’s food.

If this is a concern for you, one option would be to strike a deal with your child that they can pick whatever they want to eat on Fridays, whether that is a packed lunch of their choosing or money for their favorite shop-bought meal. Monday to Thursday, you can ask that they eat the food you pack or use the money they have to buy a school-approved lunch.

Alternately, you could include both healthy snacks and one guilty-pleasure treat in each day’s lunch.

Smoking and Vaping

It is no secret that teenagers love to smoke and vape, even if they are under the legally required age to purchase these products. If you are concerned for your children’s lung health, you can keep an eye out for tell-tale signs of smoking and vaping. These signs include a stained front tooth, stained fingers, smoke smells on their clothes or in their cars, and their money depleting more quickly than expected.

However, there is more to be done. If your kid’s chosen method is vaping, rather than smoking, you might miss the smells and there won’t be teeth staining as signs. There is a smarter backup: vape detector devices. Now, we are not suggesting that every household with concerned parents splashes out for vape detectors. First, this would be expensive and impractical, but moreover, it would likely lead to fights between teens and their parents.

Instead, we ask: do schools need vape detectors? All school buildings will already be fitted with smoke detectors, which is enough to put teens off from smoking in the school bathrooms, but vaping can still go largely unnoticed. So, to prevent this unhealthy habit from continuing, school bathrooms can install vape detectors so any kid vaping during school time can be detected easily. If you think this is a good idea, contact your local schools and set a meeting to discuss the prospect of vape detector installation.

Driving

Allowing your sons and daughters out of your sight in their automobiles can be a scary thing, especially as we know that teenage car crashes are not uncommon in the US. If you are concerned about your kids going to school in their cars and how they drive when they are with their friends, you can do more than just issue words of caution.

You can get a Black Box installed in their cars. These contraptions collect data that can be useful in insurance cases following accidents but also serve as deterrents for drivers when it comes to speeding, driving recklessly, and not wearing a seatbelt. They can also encourage safe driving habits when your teen is aware that their driving is being monitored.

The Black Box collects and shows data such as the speed of the vehicle, the throttle position, how the brakes were used, airbag deployment, the use  of seat belts, angles, and many other factors as they were about 20 seconds before, during and 20 seconds after a crash. You can use this data to help your kids if they were in an accident that was not their fault but also use this tool to deter them from driving in a negligent or dangerous manner.

Phone and Device Monitoring

Another way to track driving habits is by installing a parental control app.  However, the data collected may not be as thorough or consistent.  Besides, the use of these apps are most often selected because of the myriad of additional features they offer.  The activity that you are able to monitor will depend on choosing the right app or software application.  You will be able to restrict access to chat rooms and even monitor texts and phone calls. Not all phone tracker and monitoring apps are created equal.

If you want to expand your monitoring to additional devices, such as laps tops and computers, you will need a software program that handles all devices. Parental controls allow you to set the level of phone usage in accordance with your child’s age.  For younger kids you can block access to harmful website outright, while increasing trust levels as they grow older.

You can only do so much to control what your kids are doing at school.  Parents put a lot of faith in school teachers and administrators to provide supervision and implement proper fail safes when students are alone.  Whether it’s daily nutrition, harmful substances, driving or the use of phones, every tool is a valuable defense to ensure you’re kids are behaving appropriately.