Attorneys General – Enlist Corporate Sponsors In Efforts To Inform Parents About Internet Safety
The Internet Safety Team
Parents are the most important link in protecting kids and teens from Internet dangers. If parents are out of the loop, if they lack Internet safety knowledge, kids are at a greater risk of falling prey to predators, porn, cyber-bullying, identity theft, and all the rest of the Internet garbage.
This battle against the dark side of the Internet can best be fought on several fronts: law enforcement, schools, churches, government programs, students, and most importantly – parents. As everyone involved with Internet safety knows, targeting and reaching the parents is a difficult task. The reality is that most moms and dads, with their busy schedules, or just from sheer exhaustion, won’t ever attend an Internet Safety meeting at school, church, or anywhere else. This means most parents are un-informed or under-informed regarding Internet safety, which translates to more kids at risk.
However, there is a way to reach them — and by the millions. How, you say?
We must bring Internet safety materials into the parents’ natural habitat. In other words, where do they hang out? Think about this. Outside of the home, where does every parent, or at least one of them, have to go every week? They buy groceries, they go to Wal-Mart, their kids eat Happy meals at McDonalds. Get the picture?
Here is the plan. The Attorney General in every state must enlist as corporate sponsors those companies within the state, that already have millions of moms and dads as part of their customer base. Then every parent coming into the store gets a copy of the Kid Safe Cyberspace booklet. Parents may not go to meetings at school, but they all shop for groceries and take their kids to McDonalds. (Grocery stores and McDonalds are used as examples only. Every state has their own corporate sponsor possibilities.)
The Kid Safe Cyberspace booklet is ideal for this project, not only for its content, but also for its small size (20 page pamphlet style), very low cost of printing (few cents per copy in very large numbers), and it can easily be tailored for specific states and various sponsors.
The Kid Safe Cyberspace booklet was written as a practical guide to assist busy moms and dads — which is most of them — by giving them a one-stop solution to protecting their kids from Internet dangers without the time consuming task of wading through lengthy books, DVDs, or searching all over the Internet. This 20-page booklet, along with its corresponding web site, are all parents need to become informed, knowledgeable and confident in their understanding the essentials of filtering/monitoring systems, parental controls, chat room and social networking dangers, interpreting their kids chat shorthand (PAW – parents are watching, LMIRL – let’s meet in real life), to name just a few.
The problem with Cyber Safety programs, aimed at youth, is that, like most other safety precautions we encourage our kids and teens to take, they are ignored, and this is because young people think of themselves as invincible. That is why you must have parents knowledgeable and involved in their children’s online world. With the Kid Safe Cyberspace booklet in the hands of moms and dads you then have a complete Cyber Safety team – youth, parents, schools, churches, and law enforcement – working together toward the common goal of Internet safety for all kids.
I propose that corporate sponsors and the Attorney General have a joint press conference to promote the combined effort to provide every family in your state with a Kid Safe Cyberspace booklet in order to inform and guide parents as to how they can protect their children from Internet dangers. The corporate sponsors will get a tremendous amount of free advertising because the news release will be made available to every media outlet in the state, and there will be many follow-up stories that fill the “public service” requirements for the news organizations. The sponsors can promote the booklet in their own advertising, offering free booklets, no purchase necessary. With the news coverage and targeted advertising, these sponsors will get many new people in their stores. The booklets can be printed with an added tear-off page with special coupons. I am sure the sponsor marketing department can come up with a hundred more ideas to ensure every family in the state gets this booklet and the sponsor increases its customer base.
With the large quantities to be printed, the booklet cost would run no more than a few cents per copy. Add to that a small licensing fee and the overall cost would probably be less than 5¢ per copy. You can print 1,000,000 copies of the booklet for less than $50,000. To most major corporations that is just a drop in the bucket.
The world is out to rip children from the safety and protection of the family. By combining corporate marketing and the high profile of the Attorney General’s office you can become a more effective force than by working separately. You can get this booklet into the hands of moms and dads, and save millions of kids and keep families intact.
Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, the past president of the National Association of Attorneys General said in May 2009, “Our goal is to better educate, engage, enlighten, and empower children and their parents in the safe use of online technology.”
It is my hope that the incoming president, Attorney General Lawrence Wasden of Idaho, continues the focus on the most important link in the Internet safety chain, the parents.
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