This old school parenting hack is a must-do if your children walk anywhere alone.
Stranger danger is an important lesson to teach children, and showing your children this simple easy-to-do safety trick could save their life one day.
Technology has come a long way, and making sure your little one has a mobile phone may give you piece of mind, but a phone could run out of battery power, whereas this one little hack doesn't need plugging in.
A simple agreed-upon code word, between a mother and her daughter, prevented the attempted kidnap of a 10-year-old girl in Arizona.
The girl was walking with a friend in broad daylight when a man in a white car pulled up alongside them.
The man claimed that the girl’s brother was in a serious accident and that she needed to get into the car and go with him.
Thankfully, the girl remembered that her family uses a special code word - a word or phrase the adult needs to know before the child goes anywhere with them. This could be applied at school pick ups too.
In this instance, the young girl asked the would-be kidnapper what the code word was, after he couldn't provide it he drove away.
In an interview with local news station ABC15, the girl’s mother Brenda James explains how the family only recently started using the rule.
‘We actually just came up with that a few months ago,’ she admitted. ‘So it was something really recent from a story that I read, it saved my daughter's life,’ she said.
In a statement, the local head of police Sheriff Mark Lamb congratulated the parents on teaching their daughter about stranger danger and urged other parents to do the same.
'Kudos to the parents of this child for having a code word and talking to their children about stranger danger,' said Sheriff Lamb.
'We hope by putting this [story] out, it will encourage parents to have that conversation and create a plan with their children, so they know what to do if they are in that situation.'
