Adults are increasingly aware of the risks of identity theft, but how many of us think about protecting our children's identities? This is an issue that we should be thinking about from birth, when baby registries, online birth announcements, and even the "Stork News" sign in the front yard expose kids' personal information--name gender, date of birth, and home address--to the wider world.
Children who get their identities stolen may not know for years, until they grow up and go to apply for a job, student loan, or credit card themselves. You can imagine what a mess that would be. It is important to periodically monitor our kids' credit reports to make sure there is not any strange activity going on.
The South Carolina Now website has a good article on this topic, with links to many resources.
One of the experts in the article points out that parents often use their child's identity because of their own bad credit. Strangers pilfer identifying information through mail, trash, and poorly secured forms (say, at a school or doctor's office).
Some basic precautions start with the idea of paying attention, investigating unusual occurrences such as a young child receiving loan or credit card offers in the mail, and building in precautions like investing in a home office shredder.
Everybody should review their credit reports with the three major credit bureaus, which you can do free once year.
We need to watch what others are saying about us online, and what information we are giving out. Many websites, even legitimate ones, are not in compliance with COPPA, the law that requires verifiable parental consent to collect personal information from kids under age 13. I am researching this topic in greater depth for a separate post, but in the meantime, it makes sense for us require our kids to ask permission before registering for any web site. If you feel uncomfortable sharing the information, don't. The extent of data mining, and how that information is used, is not fully known yet.
Identity theft creates yet another issue for parents to add to their list of important tasks, but this is definitely a case where an ounce of prevention is well worth the effort.
The (parent.thesis) blog is coming to you this week from the lakeside woods of Northern Michigan. Family vacations used to mean getting away to what felt like an alternate universe, a place that seemed to materialize only in the summer, and disappeared from consciousness the rest of the year. We used to feel cut off from the rest of the world up here. There was no TV, and if we didn't get the newspaper we could miss out on a whole week of news.
But now the online world has bridged these two universes. I checked the upcoming week's vacation weather from home, before we left. Using the Microsoft Virtual Earth map on Weather.com, I zoomed in down to the level where I could see my family's house. I know we've probably all done search on own houses at some point, but to see the vacation house from home gave me a true though-the-looking-glass-feeling.
We're still not exactly high tech up here. We don't have an internet connection in the house, but we are allowed to connect to the house next door's network. So I am sitting in the woods, on a plastic chair, blogging on my laptop. This experience crystallizes the best and worst of remote connection for me.
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New York Times workplace trendspotter Lisa Belkin writes today about the culture clashes arising now that four generations are in the workplace at one time. The World War II generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y have very different values and expectations that are not always compatible co-existing in the workplace. Think belly rings clashing with Brooks Brothers, or flex-time worship versus yuppie ladder climbing.
Belkin writes about programs designed to translate workplace standards and communication styles across these boundaries: "Summer is the season of culture shock in the working world, when the old guard comes face to face with a next wave of newcomers, and the result is something like lost tribes encountering explorers for the first time."
This trend story feels a little pat and overgeneralized, but Belkin's article made me smile because I had just been thinking about what it means to have four generations online. In this case, the tables are turned with the younger generations as the experts who have grown up with online technology as their native culture, and senior family members more or less along for the ride. In our family, the grandparents are online, which is a good thing, but I have run into my own case of culture shock when my father reads my blogs.
... Read MoreAmong two-parent, Mom and Dad families, most women feel that the "Mom" role means that her brain becomes not only the family's collective memory store, but its search engine as well. Even Google can't answer questions such as:
"Mom, where's Princess Leia's shoe?" (At the bottom of the blue box in the playroom.)
"Honey, are we out of toilet paper?" (Look in the kids' bathroom.)
When are our property taxes due....when is my next dental check-up...what day is the dog's birthday?
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