ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT, 41.1 million children within the US will roam the streets, decked out like ghosts, ghouls, and the yr’s nice memes. It’s trick-or-treating time, folks. The one fright you don’t want to have as a parent is traumatic approximately your kid on Halloween night.
“You want to empower your children to be a little greater impartial as they become old,” says Leticia Barr, founder of the Tech Savvy Mama weblog. “And for mother and father on Halloween, maybe that can be a bit bit of a scary thing.”
Luckily, there are several excessive-tech types of equipment and hints you may use to put your thoughts cozy—from vicinity-sharing apps for the huge youngsters’ smartphones to gear for the littlest sheet ghosts.
Plan Your Path
Neighbourhood social networking platform Nextdoor (on hand on a laptop, iOS, and Android) helps you to coordinate with buddies to plot your trick-or-treating path beforehand of time.
Nextdoor’s Halloween Treat Map feature permits families who are contributors to your Nextdoor community to suggest whether their residence collaborates in trick-or-treating. When you’re signed in for your Nextdoor account, you could view the Treat Map, where collaborating homes will seem marked with an icon to indicate whether they’ll be passing out sweet, giving away non-meals treats, or putting in a haunted house. You ought to be a member of Nextdoor to see your neighborhood’s Treat Map and suggest your property on the map.
On Halloween night, the person or big child within the organization can open the Nextdoor app to scope out the subsequent sweet trove safely.
Keep Track
A tracker app assists you to test in on trick-or-treaters, specifically if your little monster is not exactly set off approximately texting lower back.
Barr recommends the Life360 app, available in unfastened and paid versions on iOS and Android. Download the app to your kids’ phones to peer their actual-time location and their telephone’s battery lifestyles out of your device. With Life360’s Places feature, you may set a geofence around the neighborhood wherein your kids may be trick-or-treating. From the app, you could choose to get a hold of notifications if your child leaves this area.
Get Crafty
If your children are going trick-or-treating after dark, it’s smart to convey light. While you’re at it, why no longer also have interaction with your kids with some hands-on electric engineering training?
Barr suggests kid-pleasant circuit sticky label kits, like this one from Chibitronics. It consists of LED circuit stickers and conductive copper tape, in addition to step-by using-step instructions for developing distinctive varieties of circuits. Draw out a circuit on the candy basket, adhere to the LED stickers and conductive tape, and voila! Let there be light.
The circuits’ exceptional low voltage and the low modern way that there’s no danger of fire. Since the stickers may be sewn or adhered to some of the surfaces, your own family can create glowing superhero capes and robot antennae that glow through the night.
Back to Basics
If your youngster has a phone, ensure trusted adults’ telephone numbers are stored on Speed Dial for Android or Favorites for iOS. You can also set a timer on your older kids’ phones to remind them when to textual content you their place or begin heading home. To ensure you could live in touch, have your kid bring a transportable charger. (We like this eco-pleasant charger from Nimble.)
Communication, commonplace experience, and some neat tech tricks make it a bit less difficult to ensure your trick-or-treaters get home safe and sound—simply in time to share their sizable coffers of sweet with you.
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