Protect Your Kids: Teaching Social Safety with Andy Murphy from The Secure Dad

Hey, welcome back, No Problem Parents. In this week's Social Saturdays episode of the No Problem Parenting Podcast, we have a special guest, Mr. Andy Murphy. He is the founder of The Secure Dad.

Andy's gonna share tips and resources on keeping our kids safe both online and in public spaces. He's a family protection expert with a wealth of knowledge. Stay tuned to gain some valuable insights and practical tips, and you can find Andy at thesecuredad.com.

He is a wealth of resources, that is for sure. Welcome to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. From toddler tantrums to teenage eye rolls, this podcast is your go-to for updated and old school tips and tools that are going to help you become the confident leader your kids crave you to be. I'm your host, Jackie Finneman, a 30-year counselor turned parenting coach, and I've got a lot to share, including hundreds of resources that you have access to right from your home and strategies that are going to boost your confidence and energize you. So whether you're knee deep in diapers or navigating the tween years, or you're launching your child into adulthood, subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, teachers, and daycare providers. We're going to turn your parenting problems into no problem, one episode at a time. I have been looking forward to meeting you, Andy.

Welcome to the show. Thank you, Jackie. It's great to be here today. It's good to talk to you, and it's good to be talking to other parents to help them better protect their kids, you know, online, in public, and at home.

I'm excited to be able to promote your book, Home Security, The Secure Dad's Guide, and also your podcast, The Secure Dad Podcast. Yes, I am on episode number 265 of The Secure Dad Podcast, so had a lot of great people on the show. Of course, the book has been out as Amazon bestseller. I think I wrote it back in 2018 and the lessons still ring true today.

It's all about helping parents understand how to layer their home security so that they don't have to worry about the worst case scenario. They can keep the worst case scenario out of the street where it belongs, where it can just pass you on by. That's awesome. And here at No Problem Parenting, we are all about helping parents become the confident leader.

I say our kids crave us to be. And step two of our three-step approach is to prepare for the worst. We can't always be prepared. Life throws us curveballs. Our kids most certainly do, but there are certain behaviors, there are certain challenges and certain fears that we have as parents that we can prepare for so that we're not worried. We're not frustrated. We're not scared of all these things lurking out there and we can be more proactive about them. And that's really why I wanted to bring you on to the show today, not to instill fear in parents, but to actually help them be prepared so they can more confidently lead and help their kiddos. Right. Yeah. I think that safety is the foundation for happiness. And if we don't feel safe, we can't feel happy.

So I really feel that that resonates with a lot of people. That's really the bedrock of what your family needs to feel. If they feel safe at home, then they are going to be happy at home. And that's really what we want as parents. So tell us a little bit about the Secure Dad and why it was developed and why you created it and really at the core of its mission. What are you doing for families?

Sure. So my goal is to help families live safer, happier lives. And I'm one of these people that I don't like to instill fear. I don't sell fear, that sort of thing. I want to help empower people.

And that's why I like being on your show so much. So with the Secure Dad, I founded it back in 2016 when I realized that family safety was very important to me. Safety had always been very important to me. And then when I got married, I realized the safety of my wife also falls on my shoulders.

And when I became a dad, the safety of my child fell onto my shoulders. And so I thought there's a lot of other people out there just like me who are working through this whole thing of life. I wanted to know how to do it safer and don't necessarily want to be intimidated. So I started to create the content, write books, do podcasts that I would want to see, talk to interesting people that could help educate me and help everyone else.

And so I just shared my security journey along the way. And so I don't pretend to know it all. I don't pretend to be somebody who's always going to have the right answer. But I am somebody who's going to try to do the absolute best that they can to help parents.

Wow, that is super cool. We're going to cover things like apps and how predators target kids and how we can keep our kids safe in public. I'm going to let you decide. Where do you want to go first?

Well, let's start with online safety. That seems to be the big hot topic this year is helping kids stay safe online. So one of the things that that really can hurt families and can hurt kids is for parents to say this will never happen to my child. You know, we see these outrageous stories on the news about how a kid was groomed through Roblox and some guy drove from Kansas to Georgia to pick up a 14 year old girl and abused her over a period of three days.

and we think, oh, that will never happen to me. That will never happen to my child. Well, that young lady's parents probably thought that too. So one of the things that we need to do is understand how predators are working and where they are working. I had a fantastic guest on my show by the name of Chris Hadnagy, and he is in charge of the Innocent Lives Foundation.

And he helps find predators across the world and turn their information over to police for law enforcement to take care of it. And so he was on the show and he told me a very sobering fact. And he said, anywhere your kids are online, the predators are already there. And that is very true of a predator prey relationship that we've seen on planet Earth for a long time. If you've ever watched a documentary of a cheetah, you know that the cheetah stalks the impala for miles and miles and miles. It doesn't just walk out the door and say, oh, I'm just going to go right there.

it goes where the impalas are, and it starts its hunt there. And so our kids are congregating online, so the predators are going to be congregating online. So we have to start teaching our kids from a very young age that what they say and what they do online is very important, and that they don't need to exchange information with people they don't personally know. I think something to the detriment of kids today is when you go on like Fortnite or Roblox, You have a list of friends and it's a list of people that you've chosen to connect with.

They are not actually your friends. And so this generation that we're raising will see friends in a digital way much closer than we saw friends in a face to face way when we were growing up. So there's like this mind shift that is happening with kids that I can be a friend with somebody who I've never seen before, and I can give trust to this person that I've never seen before that I have no experience with. So that's one of the things I tell my kid all the time. He's like, oh, I'm playing a game with my friend. I was like, is this a friend that you know from school, or is this a friend that you've met online?

because we don't allow friends from online. It's just people that he knows. And it's like, oh, yeah, this is so-and-so from school. We're like, okay, great, no problem.

So teaching your kids that not everybody on the Internet is who they say they are is very important. You need to teach them to understand that their information of their name, where they live, what school they go to, that information is not to be shared online. Even with anybody who they think is being super friendly, that's the sort of stuff that's got to be on their mind so that they can learn to protect themselves and to protect their own privacy this is super important i um i actually have had clients that i've worked with parents that i worked with one-on-one coaching who have had kids who have friended other people on games and also you know on instagram tiktok these predators can come off as their same age friend. And they're really not. And one of the most significant examples I can share is a person posing as a teenage girl who was putting out language as if she was going to end her life and wanted this boy, this teenage boy to show her a picture of his genitals because that was going to make her feel better. And she wasn't going to kill herself. Now that sounds It's so extreme, but it was an absolute reality.

And the boy got conned into feeling like, if I don't do this, she's going to kill herself. Right. Shortly thereafter, he contacted law enforcement himself. The law enforcement person then contacted my clients and said, hey, you're raising a great kid here.

The fact that he caught himself doing this, you know, reported it. But, you know, what do you want us to do with this? Because we get hundreds of these kinds of reports. Right.

So there's a couple of things that you can do online, and I've already mentioned the Innocent Lives Foundation. If you go there, you can actually sign up with them and tell them exactly what's going on. And that is a charity. They will accept your case if they feel like that they can help you.

There's no cost associated with that. So definitely go there first and see what they can do for you because they can help build a case for law enforcement. They can also help your child understand what's going on, start that healing process. But when these sorts of things start to happen, parents are going to get a lot of emotions.

They're going to be angry. They're going to be upset. How could you do this? How did I raise a kid that would do this?

Don't you know that your body is important and you shouldn't be sharing pictures? Once you get through those sorts of emotions, and they will come, and you will not be a terrible person for having these thoughts, but you need to control how you manage this crisis in the first hour. And that is you don't want to burn any bridges with your kid. You want them to tell you exactly what happened. It may take days, months, maybe even years for them to fully explain what happened. Be patient with them in that time and just let them know that you're ready to listen when they're ready to talk because you need to understand fully what's going on.

So does law enforcement. I hate to say if you call your local law enforcement, they will want to help, but they probably don't have the resources to do that. So that's why you need to like go to your state and look for crimes against children for your state and then also be able to because the names are different from state to state, region to region. So you can kind of go there and see what resources are available.

But those are really the things that you need to do in the moment when you realize things have gone wrong. And also tell your kids how brave they were to tell you this problem. That's going to build a lot of trust. You may be really, really angry and upset, and that will be justified.

They will also be upset. But just understand that you are both upset at an issue. You are not upset with each other. You will move on from this.

Life will go on. Things will get better. And you will do that together as a family. Yeah, I think it's really important what you said there, too, that the reactionary part, like, I mean, sometimes we can't catch ourselves in time and we do respond, you know, with yelling or I can't believe you would do that.

What were you thinking? You know, all those things. You can recover from that, right? If you do end up reacting.

But I think it is super key. Exactly what you're saying. We want our kids to come to us with these kinds of things. And if they know they're going to get some defensive scolding from us, they're not going to share.

I think it's important for parents to set up, you know, with whatever they're looking at, whether it's online gaming or social media or just being online in general and say, hey, these are the rules of our house. This is how it's going to go. And if there's a problem, I want you to come to me and I will do my absolute best not to be mad. That does not mean that there won't be a consequence for what's happened.

You may lose the privilege of going to the website or the social media app or even the device that you used. But just understand that I'm going to want to help you. And we've set up these rules and understand that if you break them, you know, A plus B equals C here. So the consequence is going to come.

So a lot of times I think people hear me say, oh, don't get mad at your kids. And so that also means don't discipline your kids. That's not the same thing. There has to be a consequence.

There has to be discipline. But anger and discipline are two different things. Yeah, great point. Great point.

We actually just talked about this on Tech and Teaching Tuesday, episode 216, where we talked about digital safety for kids and creating a contract around even technology use or digital use. And so parents, if you listened to that episode, or if you didn't, go back and listen to episode 216, add this to the contract where you're having that discussion about online predators. Great point. Thanks for bringing that up.

So what are some of the apps that predators use? I mean, I'm guessing everything. They use everything. Yeah.

Anything that has online communication is being used by predators. So I don't want you to sit here and say, oh, my kid is never going to play Fortnite. My kid is never going to play Roblox. My son plays Fortnite.

He plays Roblox, but we don't allow communication. We don't allow headsets. We don't allow things like that. So in that case, the kids can go and play the games at their own pace.

They don't have to worry about people just being mean to them. They don't have to worry about predators speaking with them and creating that foundation for some sort of abusive relationship because we just don't allow the communication. And those games can be enjoyed without the headset and that sort of thing. So don't just think that you have to outright ban your kids from that.

There are certain steps that you can take to be able to help them enjoy those things without predators being able to easily access your kids because predators want to go for the easier cases. And so if your kid can't even be communicated with, they're not even going to try, you know, so that's really going to help you in the long run. That's a really great point. The headset thing.

Yeah. Yeah. You can't you aren't able to hear when your kids got that headset on. Mm hmm.

Hmm. That's a key point. Parents don't have your kiddos using the headset. Right.

Also, I would in that same vein, I would say don't let your kids have a TV or an Xbox or their phone in their rooms because that's where a lot of private things can go on. Like personally, in our house, my son's Xbox is on the living room TV so that whatever he plays, I see he doesn't have the headset on. So I'm fully aware of what's going on and what he's doing. there was a time uh that he was playing a newer game and he was like hey dad look at this um somebody sent me this as a gift on the game it was a car and i was like okay so who sent you this well come to find out it was ai it's part of the built-in experience it wasn't a real person because a lot of ways that predators you know work with building that relationship with kids is by sending a digital gift like a fortnight skin or a subscription to a streaming service that maybe you said no to, things that are not tangible, that you're not going to say,

oh, this just showed up in my child's bedroom. Where did this come from? It's going to be digital stuff online. So if you can watch what they're doing on their phones, on the Xbox, on their iPad, whatever it is, have that out in the open, no devices in bedrooms and bathrooms, you're going to be in a much better situation to help them in a time of crisis. That, again, is a really good point. And I think with this particular kiddo that I was talking about with the person masking as a teenage female, the kiddo was in his room. And so likely if he'd been in the living room, he wouldn't have exposed himself or taken a snapshot to send to this person. So great point.

What's some of the information that predators are looking for from kids online? Like how do they kind of weasel their way into having the conversations or choosing kids? Sure. So there's a great amount of social engineering that goes on with the predator relationship.

So they're going to look at what you're, let's just take social media, for example. Let's take Instagram. I'm familiar with Instagram. So what they're going to do is they're going to find your kid's profile and they're going to look for a profile name that maybe has any sort of identifying information in it.

Like maybe it is a name, maybe it is a place, or it is you are a fan of something of someone in a certain age range. Then they're going to go around and they're going to take a look at the likes that your kid has. They're going to look at their posts. They're going to look at their comments.

And they are going to start to build just a basic profile of how your child is behaving online. So from there, they can either pretend to be somebody that they know, like, oh, hey, I go to your school or I'm so-and-so's cousin. And they'll try to take that angle of just, hey, who are you? What's up?

I'm somebody who's your own age. Then there are people who just outright will send, you know, pornographic images to a young profile, which is not good. And those kind of things are kind of harder to defend because it's instant. It's right there.

It's in the inbox. So I really do encourage parents that if your child is going to be on social media, make sure that they have a private account and that you can go into that app and see who their friends are, check on it and see what's going on. You can also use like a good parental control app like Bark. They are great at being able to detect these sorts of things and send you alerts immediately that something might be wrong with your kid.

And since we're kind of talking about software, I would wholeheartedly suggest get your kid an Android phone. The parental controls are much easier to implement and maintain on Android than they are iPhone. So if you can get an iPhone with like Bark on it, you're going to be in a great situation. Great information. Let's shift gears a little bit to how do we keep our kids safe in public?

Sure. So one of the greatest things that I think we can teach our kids is not to be glued to their phones all the time. And I know that is a tall order for this day and age. So maybe you send your kid, your teenager to the grocery store to pick up something, and they're just standing in the middle of the aisle on their phone like, hey, what's going on?

At that point in time, they're kind of vulnerable. They're kind of down and in. They're only focused on themselves and their phone. You could, you know, walk a horse by them in that same aisle and they may not even notice because of how the human brain works.

It's not because if you're a teenager, it's just that's how the human brain works. So I need in public all of the opportunity that I can see for something bad to occur. So I have to keep myself distraction free. So if you can keep your kid from being on their phone while driving, not being on the phone while in public, that's going to open up a lot of ways for them to say, hmm, that guy over there is looking at me, he's giving me a bad vibe, and I need to stay away from that person.

So they have to have the opportunity to even see danger coming before it gets close. So tell them if you don't need your phone, put it down, minimize those distractions so that you can fully be present in what's going on. And so that when somebody approaches your teenage daughter, she can just say, hey, I don't know who you are, walk off, go find somebody who works in the store to say, walk me to my car, that sort of thing.

So you don't want them to be at a disadvantage of not paying attention. Keeping them up and out is really going to help them in the long run. I love that's a great tip as well. Walking when they're walking just in down a sidewalk and they're looking down at their phone, they're totally not aware of what's happening. It could easily just be.

Yeah, I see tons of videos from security cameras in people will be walking down the street on their phone, fully involved in what's happening on that screen. And then somebody on a moped drives up and they grab the phone and they drive off. And the person on the phone never saw him. So it really does make you a target for a lot of stuff. Just not being present in that moment, being distracted, make somebody who has these predatory instincts think that person's an easier target over anybody else. So that's the person that I'm going for. And you don't want your kid to be that person.

And again, education is key. So even just having these conversations with our kids, your website is a wealth of information, thesecuredad.com. You have a lot of tools, links to the podcast, links to your book and other resources. Today, you have a special free download for us. Let's talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, sure. So I get a lot of questions from parents about how they can become aware of sex offenders who are in their area. So I put together this guide called Protecting Your Family from Sex Offenders. It's absolutely free. It's a free PDF download.

If you go to thesecuredad.com slash offender, you can download it there. So this will walk you through how to map out in your area where somebody who may be on the registry is located. So if you're buying a new house, this is going to be something that you're going to want to check out.

If you are planning your trick-or-treat route for Halloween, this is going to be something that you want to do. If you are concerned about somebody in your neighborhood or maybe the neighborhood that your kid frequents because they have a friend there, these are going to be the kind of tools that you need to find these people who are already on the registry. Now, I will caution you, that doesn't mean that any house that exists that doesn't have a listing doesn't mean that there isn't somebody there who could be harmful.

So these are only the people who are reported. And not every state reports like a name, address, and picture of a person. Some states do, some states don't. So it just kind of depends on where you live.

So this guide will walk you through how to find that information, going to safe, legitimate websites that you can trust. Thank you for that. and giving us the heads up about that too. And then you also have other family protection resources like information security.

Yes. Open source intelligence, also called OSINT, is the information that we are giving away online. And it's our likes on Facebook. It's the accounts that we follow, the posts that we make, all the things that these little breadcrumbs that are out there about us, our preferences, and who we are that people can use to build a profile on us, to scam us or to harm us in some way.

So those are the things that like what's happening right now. And I've just done a podcast on this. It's all about deep fakes and videos that are existing where a person will take a picture of a child that's found on your Facebook page. and they will use AI and machine learning to put that face onto an existing pornographic image and they create something very terrible.

So I am cautioning parents as part of OSINT, don't share publicly pictures of your children. So if you need to, instead of posting them on Instagram or Snapchat or whatever it is, start a private text group with your friends or relatives and share those pictures there. so that way, one, your child has privacy online so that everything that we put online about our children is always going to be there. It's never going to go away. It's always going to exist on some server.

So I am telling parents, hey, limit the pictures that you put of your kids online because you don't want somebody doing something bad with it. But it also is going to protect the privacy of your kids. That's all part of open source intelligence, and of course deep fakes is becoming a very scary thing. where I used to think it was just something for, oh, somebody's going to make a deep fake video of the president.

Now people are making deep fake videos of people who are at your school, at your church, and at your office, because you can go on your smartphone and download one of these apps that'll make something look just real enough to potentially ruin your reputation. Man, it's such a shame that this can even happen. But there are ways that we can protect our information. There are ways we can delete ourself from people's searches.

All of that is on your website. You give so much great content away, Andy, and I really appreciate that. One of our missions here at No Problem Parenting for 2024 is to bring resources to parents that they can access right from the comfort of their home that is available to them no matter where they live. And your website is a wealth of information, and I'm really grateful for that.

I appreciate you coming on the show and being with me here today. parents check out andy at thesecuredad.com again you can check out his podcast listen to that for tips tools and resources on protecting your kids and your whole entire family thanks again for being here today thank you jackie it's been a pleasure to talk with you all right that's it for today's episode of the no problem parenting podcast hey thanks guys for tuning in if you found value in today's episode click the subscribe button and share it with other parents who might need a little boost. Stay connected on our socials by following at no problem parents for more parenting tips and get your free download of the 60 ways to respond to your kids without losing your cool. Go to no problem parents.com until next time. Remember your confidence comes from embracing both successes and setbacks. So take a deep breath, embrace the chaos and remember you got this.

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