Peretz Eichler interview on Child Safety

at the moment. What projects are you working on? At the moment, the things I'm working on, working on a second book. Um, just developing another new child safety course called See and Flee, which is a branch of the know and go system. And I'm currently working on training courses on keeping people safe in hospitals like nurses uh and security personnel and a course called nurse safe because there's a lot of violence going in and around hospitals. Okay. Protecting our children has always been something that has been important to parents and educators, family members for as long as we can remember. But recently, a tragedy in Brooklyn, where an 8-year-old boy was kidnapped and then brutally murdered has refocused everybody's attention to the necessity to protect our children to the best of our ability. in the hopes that tragedies like that could be prevented to whatever degree that we can take those precautionary measures. Tom Patiri has more than 20 years of solid experience in providing security to diplomats, celebrities, corporate executives and families. He's the creator of the CDD and CDT family protection training centers. And not only is he a trained black belt, but more than that, he is trained in preventing and helping in securing our environment both for our family, our friends, and our souls. Children are a gift. And in this exclusive interview, things which Tom has revealed about staying safe and putting safety in one's hands to do the best that they can in his professional protection handbook. Tom Peter is going to reveal to us some of the things that each of us can and must do in order to ensure the safety of our family and our children. Tom, thank you very much. Let me begin by asking you. There was a recent tragedy in Brooklyn, the things which led up to it, the things which followed after it. Many of those things are what parents would say they had no way of controlling but in fact some of the things could have been controlled. What are some of the basics in terms of what the responsibility and what a parent can do in order to prevent the child from getting lost and should they god forbid get lost. What what do we have to know about pertaining to abductions, missing children in this terrible instance that we saw to hopefully prevent tragedies like that in the future? Let's talk about being lost to begin with. What what would you tell us about that? What should a parent know? What should you tell a child? Well, first of all, let's understand children and their mindset. The problem is with kids is many young kids, you know, 8 to 12 year olds, which is usually the targeted age of abduction or kids going missing, is kids want to be adults. So they look to help out adults and they try to grow up quicker than they have. Plus, they're, you know, many kids are taught to be well-mannered, respectful, you know, so when somebody approaches them or when things happen, you know, they think they have to be polite. So we as parents and far more than I'm a protection guy which I do for a living. I'm a parent so I get this. You know we have to understand that kids are trying to grow up way before their time and they want to be like us and they see what adults do and they emulate it to a fault. Now if a child goes missing there's things that children need to know and they need to be taught prior because a child will panic in a situation unless he has something to draw from. to draw from a parent needs to tell the child on the dos and don'ts. So if they go missing, you know, couple telltale things that they must know. Number one is they should go into any local store or any place where there's a lot of movement and people because they need to put themselves in spotlight. They need to draw attention to themselves and they need to get people to adhere to them. So they go where the most populated area is, walk into a store, you know, and walk up to somebody that's working there in front of everybody nice and loud and says, you know, I'm lost or I can't find my mom or I can't find my dad. And they make sure they're assertive, you know, and talking to somebody so everybody else could hear. And no matter what, they never leave what we call spotlight in front of everybody, constantly telling them they're lost, constantly ask for them to call the police. So, as you do this, more and more people grow and get concerned. Now, most likely women will come to the aid of a child first because of the maternal instinct, but the child needs to be taught never to leave that place where they're at in front of spotlight because the more they walk away from that zone, they get into what the bad guys call isolation zones. Isolation zone is where somebody with bad intent can get them oneon-one and either make a threat or a bribe to to get that child to buy into them. So that's the first thing. Put it in spotlight. Get to a place where there's a lot of people and draw attention to themselves. And that's even if they're lost or they're missing or anything to do when there's a break between them and their parents. Okay. But let's say as in the case which we mentioned in Brooklyn, a child is walking home from camp just going a relatively few blocks to rendevous with one of the parents. there. He's out in broad daylight. The whole neighborhood is a spotlight. People that are familiar, non intimidating, and then he's approached by a stranger in a car. Okay, let's first of all, I don't really like talking about bad incidents because there's so much sadness around it. But in this particular incident, the reason why we're going to bring it up is maybe, you know, from this negative and this loss of life, which is so tragic, we could help other children, you know, never falling prey to this. Now, a child is taught not to talk to strangers. That's what parents do. They say, "Don't talk to strangers." Now, a stranger to them could be a big bad guy or what a parent paints out that stranger to be like, but nobody ever told them not to talk to somebody that acts friendly because, you know, strangers aren't supposed to be friendly. They're supposed to be mean. So, a child has mixed reviews in his head, mixed signals when he's approached from a nice man that might say, "Hey, listen. you know, I know your mom and dad or I saw you around in the neighborhood or I saw you at the synagogue or whatever. You know, in a situation where now he buys the child's confidence, you know, the key to this whole thing or things like it is there's got to be a check and balance system and it doesn't rely on the child. If the child of the eight nine ty old you know even the 11 year old age he should either be travel in groups all right or he should be waiting inside a protective area like a school you know like a training center like a synagogue like a store wherever waiting for a parent or a loved one to come get them. We in society have our kids come to us when really we're supposed to go to our kids. So you have to take the responsibility of kids. Even though you think all the neighborhoods in the world we live in are safe, you can't fall prey to that. If there's any doubt that your child is going to be alone, you have to go to the child. All right? Or you have to teach them very simple things like don't talk to anyone like anyone. All right? Do not talk to anyone if you're not in the presence of a responsible adult like a parent or a sibling. that's older, a brother or sister, you know, because again in a situation like this, the guy time to get that child isolated to con him and most likely didn't threaten him, but probably conned him and then got him into a one-on-one situation like, "Hey, you know, I'll take you to see your mom. I know your mom." And for all I know, or for all anybody know, he could have known the family, not personally, but just known him from being in the neighborhood. So, so kids need to be revamped through parents and through teaching like know and go courses and see and flee courses that we do throughout the nation on not to talk to anyone and not to stop where they're going, you know, and get frozen in time so somebody can con them into going into an isolation zone. Tell me a little bit more about know and go and see and flee. Well, know and go was a course I first developed when my son was eight years old. I read the statistics, you know, that about 800,000 children were being, you know, gone abducted or missing, you know, yearly. And it was really disturbing, right? In fact, because of that, I said, you know, what what are we doing wrong as so-called safety people or self-defense people with these kids? And I found out the old adages like don't take candy from a stranger or what a stranger look like were so outdated and wrong because the new, you know, pedophile or predator was sophisticated. He he knew how to con a child. He knew how to be nice. He knew what the child did. He had the latest, you know, types of toys or electronic devices to have the child buy in. So no was no and go was created on the twominute window of abduction. The whole con ploy situation a bad guy uses to lure a child in and know and go is created on how to become an obstacle. What that means is we teach kids not to beat up bad guys but to outsmart them. You know, we have drills like, you know, the superhero grip where we teach them how to lock on the, you know, chairs or bicycles or poles or cars and anchor themselves in and become a struggle. We teach them how to yell. We teach them how to constantly move. You know, we teach them what we call controlled chaos. how to be so much to handle that the bad guy knows he's now in spotlight and he's dealing in that twominute time window before somebody might spot him that he goes and gets out of dodge. He gets away from that child because he can't handle them. So know and go creates you know a whole child and it's done in an obstacle type training course that teaches kids how to buy that window of safety and become an obstacle in it. The C and plea is the next step. It's the upstep to know and go. It teaches kids how to fend off bad guys by using leverage maneuvers, you know, by going to certain parts of vitals to get the bad guy where now he's on the defensive and not the offensive. Because the myth about a lot of these child abductions is the bad guy actually doesn't do anything harmful to that child at the scene. He needs to lure him away. He needs to get him in an isolation zone and then he's going to carry out all those bad and evil acts in his head. So the actual window of savior or the window of safety for a child is right at the spot right then and there doing everything you can whether it become an obstacle defending tiring the guy out or just being in control chaos. That's the survival window that we teach the kids and the best thing that we do is we do it all through laughter not through tears. And that means that we teach kids in a fun environment how to empower their minds and bodies to embrace safety, not to be afraid of it. Well, let's just review one one one of the points which you mentioned. Aside from the physical moves, which I guess you're saying that there's a certain level of martial arts that every child might be taught. Is that correct? It's not actually martial arts. And the techniques are based, you know, martial arts is techniques that kids have to practice and practice and practice. What we do is we take kids in their natural moment, natural movement. Example, we'll watch kids and we'll say, "How many kids like to bicycle?" And we'll take those kids with strong legs and show them something. How many kids here play baseball? We'll take those kids and we'll use something, teach them something with their hands. So what we call you know the self-defense or self-escape maneuvers are different than martial arts. Martial arts are are new movements trained into the body over and over. We used established movements that the kids know and put them in a defense mechanism. Okay. Now what are the specific things that a parent should tell a child first as you mentioned about being approached by somebody who they might even know from the community. That's one aspect. What do they do when they're approached by a stranger? And then secondly, he said that they have to handle themselves with a bad guy. Now, they may not know that he's a bad guy. A kid is in the car. He's already in the car and he realizes it's a potentially dangerous situation. What should a parent instruct the child to do? Well, first the the the answer to the question lies in the first phase, okay? that a child has to have or a parent has to have a clearing zone or an approval zone to a child. It basically goes like this. I tell my son if I don't introduce him as a personal friend as mine and say if dad's never here, you know, if dad can't come to the school, you know, Mr. Joe or Mr. Mike will do it, then he's got the approval from me and I screen those people. Otherwise, anybody that comes into that school, even somebody posing as a police officer, a medical worker, whatever, he doesn't leave because the rule is dad didn't approve them. So, this goes to parents. You know, because they're friendly with people in the neighborhood doesn't make them their friends. So the parent has to sit down with a child and either establish you know a clearance zone as we call it or establish a code and just say listen you know if I say Mr. green is okay. You know, he's code white. You know, code white means he's daddy's friend and you'll understand that that you can go with him. So, some parents use these code things where I personally just go the route depending on the age of the child is I say here's the people you can go with and everybody else you stay away from. Now, for whatever reason the child doesn't think or freezes in the moment, he's in the vehicle. That's the toughest thing that goes on because if he's in the vehicle and it's moving, you know, you got a lot of variables. Now, depending on the age of the child, there's a lot of different things that are taught. The little things of being docel and then being aggressive that, you know, you come to a stoplight, you know, you look outside the window and you just jump out of the car, you know, that's option one. Two, turning the keys, shutting the vehicle. Option three is, you know, doing anything you can by just becoming a struggle. You know, yelling, screaming, all that. So, you become again a nuisance, a problem. But the thing that people need to realize, if a child gets into a car, he's in a comfort zone. All right? For whatever reason, however that bad guy did it, he's comfortable being there that he doesn't panic. Wait till it gets to that isolation zone. So the biggest thing as parents, as safety people, you have to explain what a stranger is, what a friendly person is, and what a friend of yours is. And the child has to get that. Two, you have to understand their age mentality. That means if a child's eight years old and thinks everybody in the world is good, he does not walk a home alone. I don't care if it's one block. you know, he has to have a little, you know, difference mentally of knowing what's good and what's bad. And that's the biggest thing because once they're in the vehicle, it becomes a big big big problem. That's for sure. What about other areas that parents need to be particularly careful about? Let's say, are there any environments that are more prone toward these type of incidents? Let's say amusement parks, shopping malls, and the like. Yes. If you go statistically, your first avenue or target avenue is usually a park. All right? Um any like local park where the kids play on the swings or ride their bikes. And what usually happens and and these abductions can happen right in front of parents because, you know, a parent's thing is, you know, he brings their kids to the park and then they usually get on a cell phone or they're preoccupied and they're they talk away from the kids. All right? because they're watching the kids and they're talking and that's a distraction to them. So they usually face another direction and remember a child can be taken in 10 to 15 seconds and be out of the area, you know, in no time. So, so you got to watch regular parks. You have to watch shopping malls, especially during the busy seasons because there's so much mass chaos. A child can get lost and get abducted. Now, most children get taken at a shopping center by the entrances and the exits. And the reason for that is because the abductors work in teams. You know, there'll be somebody in a vehicle waiting. There'll be somebody, you know, that'll approach a child and say, "Oh, did you lose your mom?" You know, they'll insinuate that the child lost their mom and he'll look around and not know. And they say, "Yeah, I don't know where she is." And she's like, "Oh, she just walked out that door." And then they get to the door, the car is waiting. Now in malls and shopping centers, there's many highways. So a bad guy or a bad team of guys, you know, usually, you know, it's a male and a female will be on a major highway before anybody knows. And you have a three-hour window to find this child. And if you don't find him in three hours, you know, 99% of the time the child the child has been, you know, killed because, you know, the bad guy now were in fears of his life. if you let the child go, you know, that they'll be told on, you know, as far as amusement parks, you know, again, because there's mass chaos, a lot of amusement parks have good security and now they have the check and balance at the door. You can't get out, you know, with a child unless, you know, you have your ticket stubs or this or that, you know. So the Disney Worlds of the of the world and places like that are very very good and safe zones, you know, from from what I know about being there, you know. So I would go parks first, shopping malls second are the biggest problems. And of course, you know, isolated zones when you're walking to and from, you know, to and from the store, to and from school, places like that. Now, the point which you just mentioned about that three-hour window, what should we take into consideration as far as a three-hour window of abduction? You're now in in the reactive mode. Something has gone wrong. And the police are going to want certain things, you know, to get involved quick. Amber alerts and things like that. That's great, but they're still going to need a current picture. When I wrote my book, The Personal Protection Handbook, I interviewed a lot of people that whose kids went missing, not abducting, but missing. And when they gave a picture to the police officer, the picture was at least eight months to a year old. You know, when you have a child 8 n 10, 11, they change daily, you know. So, it's good to update your picture monthly, the one you have in your wallet or on nowadays on your camera phone, you know, because all these phones have these great cameras. So, so one of the things that I actually teach u my safety groups when I do it I'm like listen you're going to somewhere there's a lot of people before you work in you know have your son smile and take a picture right then and there now it's on the phone you got the most current picture of them you know when when you're at the mall or you're at the park or you're at you know on vacation and that could come in handy because the first thing they're going to do is put it you know out on the net and show a picture of of this neber alert and the picture is the difference that could save that life. The second thing is all after the fact. You know, people talk about having the child's fingerprints, DNA. Well, that's usually used when they got to, you know, identify the child and usually the bad deed has been done. So, so the description of the child, what he's wearing, especially his shoes, because an abductor can wrap a child up in a blanket or change and put a quick shirt on him, but the shoes usually always stay the same because they don't have all different shoes in their trunks. So, when you give a description to the police officer or who's ever looking to mall security or whatever, you make sure you go from the top of his hair to the bottom of his feet and remember the shoes. Okay. How quickly does a person have to respond to notify let's say federal authorities, the local authorities? What what are the the signs that a person should immediately say, well, I don't know, maybe they went somewhere, maybe what what does a person do when they suspect that the child might have disappeared? When should they actually begin to think that? How quickly should they think that? And who do they respond? Who should be the first person they respond to? Immediately. What is that? look, they look left, right, up, down. They got to go into, you know, what I call a controlled panic mode, which means that they got to draw attention to themselves right then and there, scream out loud, I'm missing my son, my son's missing. Because if he's in the process of being abducted and there's chaos where somebody's screaming and all this, the bad guy is going to leave that child right there and go. You know, it used to be years ago that you had to wait 24 hours to declare somebody missing, but they found out in the, you know, the aspect of a child. That that's can't happen because they'll never find them back. So, so right then and there when they they get that feeling in their stomach or, you know, you got that pit in your stomach or you just don't feel right and you get nervous, you know, it's better to be safe than sorry. I rather draw attention to myself, you know, screaming, "Did you see my son? This, that, and the other." and and find out he's around the corner than me saying I don't want to create a scene and never find him at all. So immediately as soon as they look, it's probably a 15 to 30 second window where they can't find line of sight on their child to begin acting, you know, to acting out to find out where that child is. And who should they contact? Should it be local authorities or federal authorities? They're in the mall security immediately. in law enforcement, they make the 911 call. Uh it's all depending on where they are. I mean, and most security malls have security people or most malls have security people. And if that's not the case, you know, um bottom line is is law enforcement, you know, but thing is, you know, you got to call, make that 911 call, you got to keep looking, you know, and again, you know, in the personal protection handbook, we actually teach them how to look. You know, most people look at the level of their eyesight. You know, if a kid's a lot smaller, child is a lot smaller, they bypass them in in the crowd. So, you have to go to their age level and look up and around on a 45 degree angle. Look from low to high, not high to low. This way, you'll pick up the shoes, what you're supposed to remember, like we talked about before. You'll pick up the body or the movement, and you'll see between the legs of people, not over the heads of people. It's different. Okay. What about coming up on back to school? What are the issues that Well, back to school. There's a lot of things. You know, first of all, there's different times where kids are more apt to be abducted. Of course, you have the, you know, isolated zones we talked about, but summertime, you know, kids are always playing everywhere. Parents are busy doing things. They're at the pool. You got to worry about that. back to school usually the first couple weeks because everybody is getting used to a new schedule, a new routine. So there's, you know, people dropping kids off and one of the biggest mistakes I see if parents pull up to a school, drop the child off before the child's even out the door, they're already gone. You know what you should do is when you pull up to drop your child off, if that's what you do, or you walk your child to school, make sure you see them go into the building and the door closes, then you leave. Wait that extra 10, 15 seconds, even if it means you're late for work for two or three minutes. You know, things other things they got to worry about that doesn't create an abduction is like backpack safety. More kids get hurt with backpacks because they're they're either worn wrong or the wrong size, you know, so they get, you know, problems with asphyxiation where they can't breathe or they wear it wrong on their arms, you know, and somebody pulls and they hurt their arm or their necks, you know. So when parents prepare kids not only in safety of strangers and dangers that lurk out there, they got to address making sure that the kids are properly equipped for school and that what they're wearing doesn't drag them down. Because if you take these new backpacks, kids will put 5, 10 books in them and they're carrying extra 40 pounds, which by the way makes it easy for an abductor to corner them. So if there's a situation where a bad guy corners a child, the first thing he should be taught to do, and we do this in know and go, is to drop the backpack where it is between him and the bad guy and run. Because a child can't run with a full backpack. He has no speed. So, it's the little things that save lives. What about bad guys in the school environment like bullying? Well, that that that's a bad kid. There's a difference. I mean, kids that are bullying, bullying's been around since the beginning of time and will be here till the end of time. Most likely, and I'm sure parents would agree with this, that they have been bullied in their life or sometimes they have bullied somebody else. So in in one of our courses which we call bully guard, we teach kids, you know, in in school districts on how to be how to walk away with confidence. It's confrontational avoidance. No matter what somebody says to them or how they say it or what physical threat is, we teach them about the zone that somebody enters into their personal space. And with their personal space being occupied, that's not a good feeling, especially for a docel child, how do they get out? How do they walk to safety, you know, and how do they bring attention to the buller or the guy that's bullying? The problem here is, you know, with all the new school laws and all this that children can't act out in self-defense, you know, there's zero tolerance. That means a child, you know, needs to walk away because if it's physical, they both end up with punishment. So the biggest thing about bullying is confidence. A child has to learn to be confident. He has to know what to do and he has to get out of that bully zone as quick as he can to get to a safe zone where he feels better and he can talk to a teacher, an administrator, principal, things like that. What about going off with friends? What do children have to know about that? What do parents have to tell other kids? First of all, and I do this with my son, you know, and I don't tell anybody something that I don't do with my own child, is you got to screen the kids. Um, you know, kids, especially as they get from 12 to 13 or 14, moving into teenagers, they're experimental. You know, they're feeling their oats like I like I like to say at my talks. And because they are, you know that you're always gonna have one kid that's wants to push the envelope in a group. So the biggest thing is that all the kids have to be on the same page and all the parents have to be on the same page. So you teach a child not to be a follower. You teach a child, you know, about peer pressure and you tell them no matter what, if they feel that it's not right, if that internal alarm that we all have that's built in us that gives us that queasiness in our stomach doesn't feel right, then they need to either call the parents up because most have cell phones now or they need to take one of their friends or the other friends and say this is not right and then split the group. But one thing they don't ever want to do if they start off with a group, one of them never leaves the pack because that's when a bad guy, if he sees five kids together and he sees one walk away, you know, maybe he didn't feel like he's part of the group or the kids are being kids and being mean, then he sees that child on a one-on-one environment and that's a room for abduction. Does the nighttime pose any different threats or challenges or safety measures other than the daytime? Anytime there's low lit or nighttime, you know, areas that don't have a lot of lights, um, or, you know, nighttime comes in, it's the mystique on on a lot of things. First of all, darkness when a child's walking home, because the influence of TV and the unknown brings in fear factors. And with fear factors coming, you know, if a guy is coming down with a vehicle and he shines a light like his lights are pointing to the child and he goes talks to the child, now the lights in that child's eyes, he doesn't really see them, you know. So you got fear factor, a blindness quality in there and then the abduction occurs. So, so yes, nighttime plays a part, but believe it or not, in the history of abductions, most of the time they're in broad daylight. So, there are steps that parents can take by informing their children of what Yeah. And one of the biggest things that parents need to do is, you know, school districts hire us throughout the country to do all these programs and that's good. But one of the the disconnects that I see is the parents don't get involved in the safety aspects. So a child says, "You know what, Mom? I was coming home and and you know, Mr. Smith up the road, I'm just using this name as a scenario. Mr. Smith up the road was talking to me. He's a nice guy. And she says, "Well, really, I don't know him, but if you think he's a nice guy, they allow the decision process to go to the child." So, when we do our talks, and one of the talks I do nationally is called Tom's Talk. I talk to parents without the kids in the room and I bring them through the scenarios and how to educate their kids at night when they're at home in the comfort of their own home in bed and how to introduce safety in a nonfearful way. In my talks, fear is not a factor. So, where I find the disconnect is yes, they want kids to learn safety, but yet the parents don't want to learn safety themselves. And when the kids have a problem or a question, the parent doesn't really know how to answer it. What about traveling? What answers should parents be prepared for? Let's say traveling locally on buses and trains with kids or at at the airport. Okay. Well, when you talk about traveling, first of all, if it's mass transit transit, the child should always sit, you know, inside the like one of the seats closest to like the window. that the parent always becomes what I call the barrier. You know, uh the whole thing is mass transit has mass people. That's why they call it mass transit. That a parent should always have the child or hold on to his hand or have that child, you know, somewhere like with his arm around him. They especially when the crowds get, you know, more and more people, you bring them closer to the body because more than abductions, you got to worry about you got to worry about human stampedes and people in such a hustle and bustle. They get from one place to another, whether it be work or late for dinner, whatever. They'll walk right over a child and never see them, you know. So, more kids get hurt through what I call human stampedes in mass transit than they do through abductions. Now, when you go on airlines, same thing. Best thing to do with a child is is, you know, let them stay closest to the window. Um, going through the airports with since 911, the security is so tight that the odds of abductions are slim and none, you know, but there are, god forbid, they're on an aircraft, you know, where people get unruly. And I'm not talking about hijackers, you know, sometimes people come on, they're drunk or people are arguing. You don't want a child to witness that. So, you preoccupy him. You keep them, you know, focused on you. You don't let them watch, you know, the bad things that go on because it's only going to scare them or put something into their subconscious. So, we as parents have to be screeners as well as protectors. That's very true. And the other thing that we we really want to know is along those lines of of kids on on trains from planes and things like that that the parents have to be prepared. Is is it such is there such a thing as a parent being overprotective? Well, you know what? When we talk to people about being overprotective, there's a difference. There's paranoia and then there's being overprotective. A child needs to develop independence through confidence. But that independence can't override, you know, where the child doesn't understand safety. So the biggest thing that we have to do as parents is, you know, actually be, you know, people that could understand, well, he now understands and he does get what safety is about. He's trustworthy enough. if his friends are good enough, you know, I could now start letting him go to the park as a group, still with a check and balance, you know, calling the cell phone or, you know, once in a while my son's playing down the school ground, I'll just take my bike and ride by and I don't bother them. I just make sure they're all doing what they're supposed to. So, so, so paranoia and and keeping somebody in the house their whole life till they're 19 years old or 18 years old, you know, can sometimes work against the child because he never grows up. He never matures into who he's supposed to be, you know, and he doesn't develop social skills. So, we as parents write a fine line of making the right decision at the right time. But if you've been a parent, you'll know you could see a child's maturity. And if a child just accepts everybody as nice people, you know, then it's time for you to remove yourself as the safety person. Put them into a good safety course like see and flee or know and go and let them understand from professionals how to be safe. What is the blanket method which you talk about? Well, there there's a there's a couple of different methods. you know, the blanket method, you know, in one of our CDT family courses that we teach. What does CDT stand for? Excuse me. CDT. Can you tell what does that stand for? Yes. CDT um was first designed as uh actual restraint method for law enforcement security. It has gone and risen into what we call child defensive tactics. what children can do defensively to keep themselves safe. And the blanket method really works on the concept of bodyguard. I mean, I'm a professional bodyguard. I've been doing that my whole life. So when a mom and dad, you know, are with their children in this in a situation, let's say a mall, and something's going bad and aggressive, the mom maternal instinct uh grabs a child and blankets them and turns them away so they don't can't see what's going on. So if that violence or that altercation or that aggressiveness comes to them not because they want it, just because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time, the other person can worked as a diffusion mechanism, you know, to get the child and the mom to safety while he tries to deter and diffuse the situation. So the blanket method takes the maternal instinct of the parent that's closest to that child, blankets them with love, and gets them close to their body where the child child feels comfortable and evacuates them out to the safest zone that they see in their direct line of sight. Okay. Do you think that uh every child from what age, I don't know, should be equipped with a cell phone? Well, that that again with cell phones, it's a decision of maturity. I I believe that they come in handy for a couple reasons. Um, first of all, check and balance. Second of all, that all of them could be tracked now because they have the B. Most of them anyway, they have the built-in navigation systems in there so that chip can be tracked. Um, so it's very very good that if somebody loses their child, how they can get the phone company and the police in there as long as the child has the phone on them. Um, it also gives the child a comfort zone that if something goes bad or there with kids they don't want to be to make that quick call and say, "Mom, dad, come get me." So yes, I believe cell phones are a must. It's just at what level are they able to use them responsibly? and and that's that can be I can't say for eight year olds and I can't say for 10 year olds it's all age specific on a child and how you raise them okay let me just ask you these final questions just on on this part as far as child safety are there any other issues that you feel in regard to child safety that should be addressed parents should be aware of or things that you've seen recently that maybe you haven't disclosed before that are more recent in terms of your you know your research and your experience what do Do you mean by checks and balances exactly to just give me an idea of that? And in summation, would you give me like three to five points that you would say every parent should know in the preventing of having a child go lost? Well, first of all, the biggest thing that I would tell everybody in safety is that we are reactive society. We do not think about safety is not something we go wake up to and it's not something we go to sleep to. You know, when I wrote my book, the personal protection handbook, I interviewed over a thousand victims. The first thing they said is, "I never thought it happened to me." And the reason why they said that is because they never address safety. So, in order to be safe, you have to know how to be safe. You have to be educated. The human body and the mind are not taught safety. They're not taught defense. It's a learned mechanism. So if parents are bringing children into this world or guardians are bringing children into this world and and being responsible for them, well they're responsible to clothe them, to feed them, to educate them, and it's also to protect them. And part of protection is safety. Now checks and balances is very simple. checks and balances is you can have a coded system what you believe in with your kids. You know, you could have a number system like every, you know, every hour call me. Um, you could have a clearance system where you introduce the right people to them and say if mom and dad can't make school, these are the only people that could pick you up. And you also can tell that to the school district. You know, you also have a safety system where you teach them the best places to go when they're walking home. So, you walk home from school and, you know, they're with a bunch of kids are approached by a car. You know, you already told them you run into this 7-Eleven or you run into this, you know, Walmart, you run into this store, whatever it is that you cleared for them to go in there. You take them through who to talk to. And this is what we do in courses. the little things that parents don't think they have time to, you know, we as safety guys are doing. But if a par if a child's not familiar on what to do and you only tell them, you don't show them, they're not going to do it. So your check and balance is whatever you say you must do. So if you tell them, you know, what stores to go in, then you drive them over there and you show them what to do. If you tell them who's clear as your friends, then when you get your friends there, you say it in front of your friends to them. A child needs you to, you know, to drain this right into his head or ingrain this into his head and say, "Okay, here's the rules of safety in our house." And when you start at an early age, by the time he's a teenager, it's indoctrinated into him like brushing his teeth. So, I'll end with this. You know, the first thing that parents all must do is in order to be educated in safety, they have to get involved and make safety a part of their children's lives. Let them take courses like know and go or see flee or older courses like teen safe and they got to get involved in attending Tom's talk or training for life courses so they're all on the same page. when they both have taken courses separately, then they need to get into a family safety course and do things together with their kids. So safety does not become a scared tactic. It becomes an empowerment dripping mechanism. You know, the second thing is explain to them that there's all different types of people that strangers even though they not might not be people they know or don't know that strangers act like friendly people. And sometimes these friendly so-called strangers know more about the child and the parents, you know, than the real good friends because they've done their homework on the community. You know, the third thing is never go with anybody, anybody. And teach them that if it gets physical, and in most cases it doesn't. It's more of a conloy than it is a physical abduction. You teach them, you know, let them go through these courses and learn the anchor method, how to anchor their bodies to different places and buy time. The window abduction is less than two minutes. An average child, you know, can last 15 minutes of doing what we call control chaos, you know, yelling for help, being an obstacle like a squirming worm, locking onto a bicycle or a sign, and things that can get them, you know, help. You know, the fourth thing is at night, get involved in their lives. Talk to them about their day. if their child's reluctant to talk about somebody, you know, whether it be a a teacher, a neighborhood person, you know, somebody in a religious group or whatever, and he's he gets very closedmouthed or sensitive, you know, or he's they see the child's got new toys or new electronic devices, get to the bottom of that because those are telltale signs that somebody evil could be entering into their world through what we call, you know, the bribery method. You know, and finally, at the end of the day, there's no such thing as being oversafe. You know, make sure your kids know you love them and you do this because you do love them. And get involved all the time in everything they do. And show a presence in the community. Show yourself with your children, all different places. Show that you're attentive to them, attentive when they're playing, attentive when they're in amusement park, attentive when they're in a pool. and that makes bad guys stay away from kids because they don't like parents that pay attention. I think you said it very profoundly and something that is going to be food for thought for many of us. Uh I just wanted to thank you for that and I hope that we'll be talking again in the um in the near future about other safety issues. That's Tom Petiri on safety.