Talk With Your Child About Chaperone^sm

Chaperone is all about communicating.
A great starting point is to talk with your child about how Chaperone can assist your family to communicate even better. The following information is intended to help you and your children understand and discuss Chaperone's special features to better stay in touch.

Chaperone's Special Features
Chaperone is designed to help you communicate with your children and can be used as a tool to help put your mind at ease by knowing their location at a given time.

There are two ways your family can use the service. First, you can locate their phone by using the Chaperone Child Locator. You can also use Chaperone with Child Zone, which is an additional feature that lets you set up a perimeter that alerts you if your child enters or leaves a specific location.

Chaperone Child Locator
Helps you locate your child's phone from your PC or from your Verizon Wireless phone. Using Chaperone Child Locator, you can program the calling buttons from the Web site, and perform a location request that displays the location of the phone on a map.

Chaperone with Child Zone
Allows you to construct an area called a Child Zone around the vicinity of the locations that you choose. These might include your child's daycare center or school, a play park or a sport field. If your child arrives or leaves the predetermined area, you are alerted via TXT message on your Verizon Wireless phone.

Talking with Your Child
It is important for your child to have a basic understanding of how the service works, and how to responsibly use Chaperone. Therefore, all parents are encouraged to take a few minutes and reiterate key points concerning Chaperone's special features. It is also important that your child understands how the service works. Here are some family discussion tips to keep in mind during your discussion:

• Remind your child that Chaperone only works as intended for your family when the phone is powered on, it is in your child's possession and when your child is not talking on the phone.
• Tell your child that the phone has four pre-programmed buttons that allows the child to stay in touch with the people you program into the phone. Ask your child to identify some of the people that should be considered, such as mom or dad (home and cell phone), the babysitter, an aunt or an uncle, or an adult family friend. If one of the buttons is designated for you, show your child this button, and let them know they can reach you.
• Explain that in the event of an emergency, your child must remember to press and hold the emergency key for several seconds in order for the call to proceed. Reinforce the importance of your child providing whatever information he or she has about the emergency to the person that answers the phone. Stress that he or she should not stop talking to this individual, unless instructed to do so by the emergency personnel.
  
  To make an emergency call, the emergency button on the phone must be programmed with your local number for emergency services; in most areas that number is 9-1-1, but check with your local authorities. Teach your child how to make an emergency call using the emergency button by following these steps:
  
  
  • Press the emergency key; a confirmation message will appear on the phone screen
  • Press the emergency key again for several seconds to confirm that you want to make an emergency call
  • Press the send button for several seconds so that the phone will dial the designated emergency number
• Emphasize that the phone should never be played with, or used by any of your child's friends. In addition, clarify why it is important that only you or a legal guardian can use the service to get location information about your child's phone. This is possible because Chaperone provides the information in a closed environment - nobody except the authorized user can gain access to the location information about your child.
• If you have set up Chaperone with Child Zone, you should take some additional time and discuss how the service works. Ask the child to help you identify different locations that you will set up. These might include a school, a specific baseball field, a local community park, or several friends' houses.

A family-fun video is available to assist you in opening the discussion. It identifies some of the capabilities of the service, and features an animated family that is introduced to Chaperone through the adventures of the youngest child, Zip. Along with sister Mac, his lawn-mower-riding grandma and friends, Zip learns how to set up the Chaperone service, and how to use it during an emergency.

Parents and their children are encouraged to watch the four brief segments together. It is also important to discuss ways to best handle different situations, and how the Chaperone service could help. If you have not yet viewed the video with your child, you can find it below

View Video