(Brief)How to Protect Your Children from Child Abuse: A Parent’s Guide
Summary: Based on How to Protect Your Children from Child Abuse: A Parent’s Guide, I’ll put together a lot of useful information and skills for you to identify child abuse. Most importantly, I’ll tell you how to keep child abuse away from your kids and what to do when you think it’s happening.
Last Updated on July 4, 2023 by Jack Robertson
Boy Scouts of America has released a book named:
Youth Protection
How to Protect Your Children from Child Abuse: A Parent’s Guide
In this book, they are trying to tell us the importance of helping children and protecting them from child abuse. Also, some methods and guidance are given.
Contents of A Parent’s Guide:
Messages for Parents: The necessity of protecting your children
A kid needs help from teachers, friends, and most importantly, parents. If your kid is not getting enough help from you, what else can he expect from you?
If your child suffers from child abuse from family, school, or cyberspace, will he tell you when he considers that you’ll not offer any help? I suppose the answer will go to NO.
To avoid such a situation from happening, we must learn to protect our children with all means from every aspect. If we don’t, those offenders will be truly happy for our stupidity. And what will happen if we fail to protect our children? The consequences can be devastating or worse, deadly, which you can find many cases from the news.
Definition and Types of child abuse
Child abuse often refers to an action implemented by adult results in physical, emotional, or sexual mistreatment or neglect for a child.
The adult may be a parent, grandparent, or other family members, or may another caregiver, including a coach, teacher, babysitter. In some cases, it can be worse: pedophiles from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or in real life.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline’s classification, there are 5 types of child abuse, including:
- Physical abuse: A child is hurt and injured by an intentional action;
- Sexual abuse: A kid is involved in sexual activity due to an individual’s power or authority;
- Emotional abuse: When a child is cheated in a way that is not good for the mental health, like shouting to the kid, locking up, name-calling;
- Neglect: Guardians fail to provide the basic needs of the kid, affecting the physical and mental development;
- Bullying: A child is bullied, harassed, or hurt by other teenagers from school and the Internet.
How to protect your children from child abuse
To be responsible to your children and guarantee that they will grow up with happiness and health, we as parents must stand out against any child abuse to our children.
To help those parents who have no idea how to protect their children from child abuse and bullying, I will put together 3 parts for you. You may follow them bit by bit to protect your child from child abuse:
Method 1: Maintaining a good and healthy relationship with your child
For starters, talk to your child and hang out with him/her when you’re free.
Spend more time with your kid instead of a phone, a computer, or your work. Get your eyes away from the screen and look your kid in the eyes, talking to him/her with love and patience.
Have some conversations like ‘How’s your school this week/today, ‘Do you love your new teacher’, ‘You want to watch the Avengers this Saturday night’, understanding your kid’s recent hobbies, interests, and something like that.
With time, you are more than his/her mom or dad, but also the best friend that is related by blood. As a result, your kid is most likely to talk when he/she is in trouble and you’re available to kill that trouble from the beginning.
Signs of child abuse
Once you discover that your kid acts weirdly and has the following signs, he/she is likely to suffer from abuse at the time being.
Behaviors:
- Afraid of physical contacts and avoid touching, hugging, kissing;
- Regressive behaviors like sucking thumb, curling up while sitting, often being in a daze, getting depressed easily;
- Others like refusing to bathe or bathing excessively, age-inappropriate sexual behaviors, sleep disturbances, or nightmares
Physically:
- Bruising or swelling on any body parts, blood on sheets or undergarments, broken bones, a sudden hairstyle change like short hair or crew cut.
Verbal cues:
- Speaking with words or phrases that are too early for his/her age, being less talkative, being in a sudden silence.
What to do when you think child abuse is occurring to your kid, try these:
- Talk to your child in a place that makes him/her comfortable, just the two of you, nobody else.
- Try to ask your kid something like ‘Is there anybody touching you lately’, ‘Do you want to go to school’, ‘Do you want to continue your basketball/piano/painting class’, etc.
- Avoid using the words like hurt, hit, rape, assault, indecent. Kids have different ways of thinking and speaking. Words and actions that are bad according to us seem meaningless or too difficult to understand for them.
Method 2: Understanding your child’s recent developments
If your kid is sometimes unwilling to open the mouth and tell you his/her daily, try talking to your kid’s best friends, teachers, coaches, or anybody that stays the longest time with your kid. Keep the talk in private.
Doing so not only helps us make sure the person that your child spends the most time with is treating your son/daughter decently but also to keep in touch with your kid’s recent developments.
Pay attention that if your child appears that he/she is unwilling to go to school, interests class, or sports training, keep an eye on the coaches, teachers, classmates, and teammates.
Method 3: Looking for technical supports
We should never under underestimate the power of technology. With the popularity of smartphones, some software developers have released some special tools for parents to monitor and protect their children. We call this kind of software Parental Control programs.
Now, many kids have a cellphone and most of them have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok accounts. And a parental control program can give you access to these apps on your kid’s phone remotely. You can see:
- Persons that your child talks to,
- Contents that your posts,
- Issues that he/she googles,
- Complaints your kid makes,
- Etc.
You may say this is an act of violating your child’s privacy, which is indeed correct. But it does help protect your child.
Benefits of Using A Spy App
1. Discover the abnormality
As parents and a once teenager, we know how stubborn a kid will be when he/she encounters troubles. Instead of telling parents what is going on, kids tend to release emotions online, like posting on Facebook & Twitter or talking to a net friend.
It’s hard to locate your kid’s account when he/she doesn’t want to friend you on the social networking platform.
In this case, a parental control tool allows you to check out your kid’s feelings without searching for the account so that you’re able to find out what your kid is annoyed at.
2. Spot cyberbullying in time
There are a lot of cases that kids or even adults killed themselves after assaulted by trolls.
To prevent such things from happening to your child, keep an eye on your kid’s social accounts.
Whenever there is a scum bullying your child online, call the police and find that guy. Force him/her to apologize to erase the shadow of fear from the bottom of your kid’s heart.
3. Stop pedophiles
Some pedophiles will search for a target on social media. They will harass kids with disgusting texts and pictures. Most of the time, your kid is too naive to deal with these freaks.
And once you use the parental control service to find out your kid is under harassment. No more hesitation, help your kid and call 911.
4. Find your kid easily
Almost all parental control apps offer a geolocation feature so that you can find your kid’s real-time location easily as long as he/she carries a phone.
When your kid’s late for school or comes home late, don’t ask why directly. Use the parental control program, check where your kid’s been to and how long did he/she spend there. Then, go to those suspicious locations and investigate, make sure the places and the people there are harmless to your kid.
By the way, some of these programs offer you a digital fencing feature. How does it work?
Well, you can set up an area on the map as safety zoom. No warning will be activated when your kid stays in this area. Once your kid steps out of the ‘fence’, you’ll receive a notification immediately.
These are all the benefits that a parental control tool can give you. If you’re interested in this kind of software, you may download one and give it a go.
Lists of powerful parental control services:
Since a lot of you have no idea how to choose one from countless parental control services, I will give you some of the top icons of the industry and you may pick up one.
NO.1 mSpy
Released more than 9 years, mSpy is always one of the leading figures in the parental control industry. Besides examining the existing texts and messages on your kid’s phone, mSpy also allows you to check out those deleted SMS to make sure your kid is alright.
With mSpy installed on your kid’s phone, mSpy will update the information, data, and activity carried on within this phone every 5 minutes. You don’t have to update the information manually.
All three of them are excellent when you want to keep your child away from child abuse and bullying. Sign up for one if you’re interested.
- For more information, you can read this: SMS Spy without Access to Target Phone Free Trial.
NO.2 EyeZy
EyeZy is one of the most advanced phone monitoring services that has won more than 3.5 million people’s hearts and the number is rapidly growing.
With EyeZy, you can easily check your kid’s SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Google, Skype, LINE, Viber, and many more apps information remotely.
If your kid has done some special activities on the phone like deleting data, changing Sim card, add new contacts, downloading new apps, searching for specific words, you will be alerted.
NO.3 TheOneSpy
Designed to be a highly considerate parental control service, TheOneSpy offers you many useful features, including geo-location, geo-fencing, social media unveiling, etc.
The app is so-called ‘invisible’ and will never be detected by your child.
FAQs for child abuse
1.What to do if a child is being mistreated?
If you find out a child is being mistreated, no matter if this is your child or not, it’s important to offer some help.
You can do these:
- First, take the child away from the people that bring damage to the kid. Call the police if needed;
- Then, dial the number of your state’s child protection system. If you don’t know one, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline and ask for help. The number goes (1-800) 4-A-Child or (1-800) 422-4453. You can visit its official site as well.
To warp up, do 2 things. One is to keep the child safe. The second is to ask for help from professionals.
2.What is the most common form of abuse?
The most common form of abuse is Neglect. Many parents or caregivers fail to give enough care to the children, not just about food and physical warmth, but also emotional care.
Every kid may suffer from the Neglect issue more or less without themselves and their parents knowing.