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Chukwu Emeka is a lawyer and university instructor who joins us from Lagos Nigeria. He is passionate about all things digital safety that pertain to children rights, protecting children online and shares the importance of why having a solid parent-child relationship goes a long way in empowering kids in navigating the digital sphere. He shared tips on what to look out for that make kids low lying fruit in the minds of online groomers and how as parents we can safeguard from this.

Some of my takeaways from this conversation:
A prepared child is less of a target : have those difficult conversations and have them early.
Child predators capitalize on children's curiosity, innocence and desire to please parents
 As a parent, connect, connect connect before you disconnect

Resources
Wise and Harmless - http://www.wiseandharmless.ng 

#lagosmums#digitalsafety#childrenonline#onlinepredators#connectbeforeyoudisconnect#

Our guest on the podcast - Meghan Cox Gurdon  is an essayist, book critic, and former foreign correspondent who has been the Wall Street Journal’s children’s book reviewer since  2005. Her work has appeared widely, in publications such as the Washington Examiner, the Daily Telegraph and the Washington Post.

Meghan shows how reading out loud offers a refreshing, fast-working antidote to the fractured attention spans, atomized families, and unfulfilling distractions of the tech era. From a thrilling look at what happens in a toddler’s brain when a grownup reads a story, to the way shared books are keeping far-flung military families connected; from the imaginative transport of classic novels, to the rejuvenating late-life consolations of the spoken word: the evidence is clear and the benefits irrefutable.

To purchase the book
https://www.amazon.ca/Enchanted-Hour-Miraculous-Reading-Distraction/dp/0062562819
 
Quotes from the book

"The sight of a parent or teacher sitting down with a book attracts young children like iron fillings to a magnet." Meghab Cox Gurdon

When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful..we are teaching that child to be human.” Anna Dewdney

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. Albert Einstein

“When a child asks for the same story again and again, he is telling us something important, though we may never find out what the important thing is. The book may be helping him perform quiet interior work having to do with fear or sadness he cannot articulate.”

"Please read to your kids. Its not the schools job to get our kids reading, its our job – and it’s a wonderful, magical act of love and caring. James Patterson

“There is no genius in Silicon Valley who has yet devised a machine half as effective for teching and There is one thing the purveyors of electronic toys and child-oriented tech would rather not say. They are no match for us nurturing the young mind as a flawed, fallible, physically present human being.” Meghan Cox

"Picture books enhance the time parents and children spend together. Its like adding an extra shot of espresso to a café latte."

Human beings need to feel competent at what they do, they need to feel authentic in their lives and they need to feel connected to others.  Sebastian Junger 


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