On Youth and Teens Today with Vanessa Van Petten

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Recently a few men have been caught popping screens off windows in my community.  Thank goodness a few of the other neighbors saw someone suspicious walking around and called the local security.  This made my mom and I very nervous and I have been wanting to write a post about neighborhood safety again.

Here are some steps I hope you will take to make sure you ave a handle on the safety in your neighborhood.

1) Sexual Predators

You would be shocked at how many sexual predators could be in your neighborhood.  Make sure to see if there are any registered sex offenders in your area.

12 Online Tools to See if Sexual Predators Are in Your Neighborhood

2) Know Your Demographics

It is important to know who is in your neighborhood.  Here is an older guest post I had about how to conduct survey’s and questionnaires.

3) Create Social Groups

Hopefully you have nothing serious to worry about in your area, so I really encourage you to set-up a parenting group or a book club because this is a great way to stay informed about what is going on with your neighbors, and the closer you are to each other, the more you can look out for one another.

4) Set-Up Your Virtual Neighborhood

I am obsessed with this.  I posted about MyStreet.com before and had lots of emails from people who sent me their stories of how it worked and how they were able to stay up on social events, meet all of their neighbors and tons of other things you can do.

I have an account with them as well, tell them I sent you!

Stay safe, stay informed,

Vanessa

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