CHWR welcomes John Graves, CLU, CHFC, Registered Investment Advisor, to the show today…

A recent survey suggested that retiring Americans are more afraid of running out of money than of death. The economy has affected millions who now must keep working years after they planned to retire.

Retirement fears have spread to businesses large and small. Many are underfunded for their retirement obligations, others can’t afford plans and feel they can’t retain or attract good employees.

Talking Points:

Is there really a retirement crisis?
How much do economic downturns affect retirement plans?
How do these factors differ for Mom & Pops, medium size companies, and big business?.
Is it realistic to think the problems will or can be fixed?
What can individuals and business owners do to be proactive?

What a fantastic interview, listen above!!!

John Graves, CLU, CHFC, manager of some $400 million in assets, and editor of The Retirement Journal.

While the headlines are filled with the tribulations of major corporations, the heartbeat of America is also powered by employees and by small business. Every one of them from mom & pop shops to small companies with a few dozen employees have to face the fact that those granted the gift of aging will someday not be willing or able to work. We politely call that retirement.

Once addressed with a gold watch, a fishing rod, and social security, both small business employees and employers are sweating the upcoming bill.

John Graves, CLU, CHFC has some solution for both businesses and individuals. Working with the basics of time, objective information and common sense “The 7% Solution” (January 2012) may solve your problems.

See also —>>> www.theretirementjournal.com

Thank you John for your time today… you were awesome and you are making a REAL difference and thanks for the heads up and all the tips today!!! our you can follow John here: @theretjournal and/or connect on Facebook…

Learn IT, DO IT, Teach IT, Share IT, BE IT

Your CyberHood Watch Partner

Bill Wardell

 
Radio Security Journalist

© 2006 – 2011 CyberHood Watch® Blog

[Think IT Won't Happen To You? GROWing Old!]

Go to The CyberHood Watch on iTunes to listen to over 350 world-wide professionals & experts helping parents everywhere, by Keeping Our Children Safe online, click below to learn how-to protect yourself!!!

Human Trafficking – Modern-day slavery is real, and shame on all of us!

This is such an atrocity of the human behavior, and an assault on human rights and the dignity of the person. How in all that is holy, can we keep silent about what is happening to children.

Children are stripped of their inalienable rights, freedom, justice, and peace.

Human trafficking is a billion dollar business and it is well-organized consisting of recruiters, fraudulent employment opportunities, facilitators of transportation, exploiters and end beneficiaries of so-called goods and services provided and produced by trafficked persons.

If you are going to traffic the illegal movement of humans, it is done through fear, intimidation, and heinous acts of indecency and cruelty. It is an action carried out by the most severe, abusive, and demeaning practices for the purpose of the exploitation of human beings.

Click banner above to learn more about some of the growing problem’s globally, such as: Every year over 50,000 women and children are brought to the United States to work as Slaves.

Learn IT, DO IT, Teach IT, Share IT, BE IT

Your CyberHood Watch Partner

Bill Wardell

Radio Security Journalist

© 2006 – 2011 CyberHood Watch

Today we bid farewell to the Overcoming Battered Lives blog.

For the last year, The Courant and Fox CT have focused on the issue of domestic violence, after the murder of Alice Morrin by her estranged husband. Alice was the executive assistant to Richard Graziano, president, publisher, and CEO of the Courant and Fox CT.

Domestic violence had hit home.

Over the next year, reporters, columnists, photographers, videographers, and bloggers kept the focus on the scourge of domestic violence. We hosted forums, and gave speeches. We fielded impossibly tough phone calls from victims, and directed them to caring domestic violence workers who knew exactly what to do. As we did with Alice, we tried to put a face on the countless victims of intimate partners.

We’d like to think that we helped accomplish some good, but please do not think that because the blog is going dark that our interest has waned. This issue isn’t going away, and we aren’t, either. In addition to continued interest on the part of the newspaper and the television station, I will continue to write about domestic violence, both in my column and on my blog, Fear, Itself. If you have questions, concerns, or suggestions for future topics, you can reach me at scampbell@courant.com. If I’m not the appropriate person, I can find that person.

Thank you so much for the discussion. Let’s not let it end.

Sometimes it’s just as important to know from where the potential source of imbalance between planting and building comes as it is to know how to plant and build. When the building component (habits and structure) of a child’s upbringing is left out, it’s usually because it involves making demands and imposing behaviors on a child, which some parents and teachers are very hesitant to do.

There are a few reasons for this:

1) fear of conflict: sometimes the parent or teacher will ask themselves: “what if he refuses to cooperate?”
2) lack of patience: when the parent/ teacher is too busy with other things to deal with the child- “Do I have the time or energy to deal with this conflict now?”
3) a thoroughly democratic worldview: when a parent or teacher in their minds feel that they themselves do not have the right to tell a child what they should do or think- “Who am I to tell the child what is right or wrong?”
4) from unpleasant childhood memories: “I hated the way my parents imposed their will on me, and I vow never to never to make my child suffer the same fate!”

For a well-balanced parenting and teaching job that includes both planting and building, whoever is involved is encouraged to overcome whatever barriers there are and engage in vigorous planting and building, providing children simultaneously with clear behavioral guidelines and good values.

And likewise, parents and teachers often leave planting out of the formula because of an educational tunnel vision. Building produces instant results. When we change the behavior of a child, we see it right away- at least on the outside, so parents and teachers often end up focusing only on the instant result aspect of their teaching.

Planting, however, really requires from you courage, vision, faith and most of all, patience. We need to convince ourselves that the values and perspectives that we teach our children will eventually produce behavioral change over time, which means you have to set aside the desire for instant results. We need to stand by calmly and wait for the behavior to change.

Now we see the importance of balancing both planting and building within a child.

The internet, because of the nature of the “beast”, is like building at a frantic speed without any planting. Because of the internet we become more and more impatient for results. The internet gets faster and faster and more and more interactive every day, with videos, and camera conferences and the like. As a result we leave out the planting more and more.

Building occurs in speeds and directions that are very hard for the parents and teachers to control. For example the internet helps to build behaviors that are more satisfaction-based rather than health- and happiness-based, and therefore more likely to be addictive than healthy. The little planting that is done by surfing online is of ideas and values that may not be at harmony with what the parents and teachers want for their children.

Exposing children to the internet causes very unhealthy balances between planting and building. Every parent and teacher needs to take the child back in their hands and start the dual job of planting and building.

Learn IT, DO IT, Teach IT, Share IT, BE IT

Your CyberHood Watch Partner

Bill Wardell

Radio Security Journalist

Now that we’ve talked about planting, we need to look at what planting is, exactly. What are some of the things parents do to plant seeds in their children? Here is an example.

In the Robinson family, a child was named after his grandfather Maurice. The parents taught Maurice (the child) that his grandfather was so honest that he wouldn’t even take a paper clip from his office to use at home. And he never spoke to anyone at work unless absolutely necessary so that he was not being paid for something that was not work. And in the home, he would not even take any food at the table until everyone had their portion, for fear that he might be eating someone else’s food. You could imagine the picture of honesty that was created in the child’s mind.

When the Maurice was about 8 years old. He was walking down the street with 3 of his friends. Ahead of him, an unpopular boy in their class dropped his pencil on the ground. All the boys went for that pencil, but Maurice got it first. And what was the first thing he did? He returned the pencil to the boy, despite the fact that the other boys didn’t want him to, and jeered at Maurice for doing such a thing, rather than going with the attitude of “finders keepers losers weepers”. When one boy asked him why he did that, he said “because my name is Maurice”

Because the boy had been planted with a seed from his parents about honesty from his namesake the grandfather, Maurice had that value of honesty ingrained in him. THAT is planting a seed in him.

Seeds can be planted through:

1. explanation
2. example
3. praise/encouragement
4. scolding/punishment
5. doing it yourself
6. establish the environment for the child
7. introduce the child to other people or children
8. show or tell the child something

Every time you plant a seed through your actions, you always need to ask yourself: “What kind of plant do I want to grow within my child”. A huge responsibility of parenthood lies in that anything you do today will sprout the plants of tomorrow within your child.

What we plant (SOW) with our children, we REEP… in all of our Futures!

Learn IT, DO IT, Teach IT, Share IT

Bill Wardell

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• Process of a plant (slideshare.net)

Begin Communication Early With Your Cub About Digital Safety

When it comes to Bullying or Cyber Bullying it is important that children understand they are safe to come to you, their parent or trusted adult, and share what is on their mind, without judgment or having someone Freak Out!

Children consistently say the number one reason they avoid telling a parent or trusted adult is the fear they will Freak Out or may end up losing their computer privileges or mobile phone use.

Unfortunately, it happens and happens all too often. Moreover, it is probably more perceived than fact, as to how your child comprehends it, so parents take a moment and assure your child, he or she can approach you and talk about anything that is bothering them without Freaking Out!

Here is a short video story you and your cub(s) can watch together. In this story, Patch has been bullied by Butch and Grizzly Bear. Because of Bear Friend and what she had learned from talking with her Mom about bullies, Bear Friend, was able to help Patch out of a bad situation when being bullied by Butch and Grizzly Bear. Bear Friend used a simple approach she had learned from her Mom.

david c ballard

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• Anti-Bullying Bill Intended To Extend Protections To LGBT Youth Likely to Pass New Hampshire Legislature (lezgetreal.com)
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Potential employers and leading institutions are Digging Deeper!

Alan, who is looking for a position in New York and did not want his name used for fear of jeopardizing his job search, said: “The HR person was almost trying to trick my reference into saying something negative. They were asking, ‘What are Alan’s weaknesses? What can he improve on?’ and on and on, beyond what was expected. It was like the third degree.”

Hiring managers are looking to get beyond the name, rank and serial number approach used by so many employers that have told by their HR department not to provide too much information, said Maryann Donovan, president of recruiting firm Impact Personnel in Norwalk…

With all the emphasis over the past 5 years to be more social and use social media to promote you and brand yourself as the expert, person to call, and hopefully the authority that everyone looks to for the latest and greatest info in your niche, while corporate America have learned what social media is and using it to now promote the companies to their customers they are also using those same tools to find out who their new employees will are going to be!!!

So, what can you do? Good question, lets look at the 4 steps you can take:

Step one:  Build your Reputation!
Step two:  Nurture your Reputation!
Step three:  Protect your Reputation!
Step four:  Defend your Reputation!

If you don’t think this problem is real, look at a couple of examples that we published last year in our OSA Investigates special issue about sexting and the potential of a living legacy…

Choices Makes a Lifelong Legacy

This was never as TRUE than now, on all the Web 2.0 social communities…

Step one:  Build your Reputation!  [Make good choices]
Step two:  Nurture your Reputation!  [Continue to make good choices]
Step three:  Protect your Reputation!  [Be On Guard, All Of The Time]
Step four:  Defend your Reputation!  [Use Reputation Defender]

Because – Potential Employers And Leading Institutions Are Digging Deeper!

Your CyberHood Watch Partner

Bill Wardell

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• Reflections on a Decade (metamorphblog.com)

Annoying As A Scratch On A Vinyl LP

Hope I have not reached the point of saturation with you, however; I know I am sounding like a broken record to myself. Somewhere in the archives of marketing it has been determined that a message must be exposed to its target audience approximately seven times before an individual becomes aware of your message.  Odd, I wonder how many readers even remember the sound of a broken record: or the proverbial “scratch”. The ritual of handling an LP – what’s an “LP”?  Okay, enough of that. That vinyl-episode of the LP era has passed.

Here is the sound of my broken record…Communication, communication, communication. It is consistently recognized as the “golden nugget” among our guests for the past two years of CHWradio. Typically, accompanying communication within the same sentence is “Awareness”. The two principals work very well together in providing children, families, and businesses the foundation for developing the concept of “enjoying the Internet safely”.

We Appreciate What The CyberHood Watch Is Doing.

When we asked Stephen Dean, Peabody Award Winning investigative journalist, when is it a good time to talk with your children about the Internet safety, his immediate response was, “When they first reach for the keyboard”. The explanation does not have to be explicit or in graphic detail, just point out that there are individuals who are not nice and who are mean to others on the Internet and no one should ever make them feel uncomfortable. Assure them that if anyone makes them feel uncomfortable it is okay to let you know, without scolding or punishment. Most children who are in trouble and sense an uneasiness with an online or offline incident are reluctant to say anything for fear of retribution or losing their computer privileges’. A sad thought to think the unimaginable has happened because the child thought the communication would be yelling at him or her.

See Dad Holding A Tired Internet/Digital Surfer

If you have ever visited an Apple store and watched the children at the kids station, it will amaze you just how early an age we are identifying. For some children, navigating is foreign and exploratory, however; for many it is familiar and accustom. Watching a five year old perform learned habits that allow them to navigate a game is a reality check. Do not think for a moment, a very young unattended or unsupervised child could unintentionally navigate the Internet and end up on a pornography site. It happens too often and I shudder to think how that encounter affects their innocence. [affects – effects…someone let me know]

Gary & Joy Lundberg

Gary and Joy Lundberg was highlighted in Bill’s earlier post, which followed our interview with the Lundberg’s. Both Gary and Joy shared a great deal of wholesome wisdom surrounded in virtue. Both Lundberg’s are authorities who have spent countless years in all aspects of the family dynamics, marriage – grand parenting – child development – in-laws, etc.

A comment in particular that I understood was the statement by Gary that we listen formulating our own reply. We are too busy thinking of a reply that we neglect listening.

A helpful piece of advice shared by Gary and Joy Lundberg when developing a communication with children are:

Listen…Give your full attention

Listen…To the emotions

Listen…To the needs

Understand…What can I do to help?

For this recording and other downloadable interviews on CHWradio, you will find them by clicking on our CHW iTunes link.

We also discussed pornography and what is does to children. I will suggest you download the show and listen – listen – listen…understand.

The natural barriers that kept pornography out of our homes have all since dissipated into thin air with the advent of the Internet. Moreover, mobile devices have been the catalyst to an exponential growth in the pornography industry.

Sadly, our youth are the biggest viewers of pornography. I will leave you with these thoughts…Pornography is addictive. It is easier for a heroin addict to recover than it is for pornography addiction.

Donna Rice Hughes

We also talked about pornography with Donna Rice Hughes, and in one of the videos in Internet Safety 101, it is stated that an individual addicted to pornography may lose his or her free agency.

Knowing your child’s online activities is paramount, not knowing is why we came up with ‘Think It Won’t Happen To You”, discover the 17 steps to better Internet parenting.

david c ballard

Mike Dolpies of AskMikeD.com

Mike Dolpies owner of AskMikeD.com interviewed the CyberHood Watch partners, Dave & Bill.

Parents today are concerned about the dangers or unintentional exposure their child might encounter while on the Internet, and rightly so.

When is it appropriate to talk to your child about the dangers of the Internet? This is the same question the CyberHood Watch partners, Dave & Bill had asked Stephen Dean,

Peabody Award Winning Investigative Journalist

Peabody Award Winning investigative journalist, whose answer was the moment they reach for the keyboard. We should note that it is not necessary to describe in graphic detail what exists on the Internet to a young child. They only need to understand that there are people on the Internet who are not nice and will try to hurt people.

A parent, who begins an early and simple conversation with your child about the Internet, will be far better off in protecting your child online in the future.  Too often children are left on their own to navigate the Internet without the foundation of communication between child and parent. Many parents feel technophobic and feel insecure about the computer and the Internet in general. Parents do not accept that as an excuse, your children need your wisdom. Do you really believe you cannot catch up with your child?

Are you aware that most children will not share with their parents if something uncomfortable has happened to them on the Internet? They fear that the parent will freak out, possibly blame the child, and take away their computer privileges.

However, parents that have established an open communication early about the Internet with their child and have an understanding that the child can share with them without worrying about blame or punishment, increases their child’s chances of enjoying the Internet safely.

Too Often Popularity Is Based On Numbers...Not Real Relationships

Social networks are a concern on many levels for our youth. Trying to deny your child access to the new Net-Generation or to participate as a digital citizen is futile. Recently, we discussed the idea of just trying to unplug from the digital media would almost be impossible. We need to empower our children and help them understand what is present on the Internet and know when to ask you, the parent, or a trusted individual for help when confronted by something or someone that makes them feel uncomfortable. You have to be the safe harbor for them to come to.

It is too easy for a child to disclose personal information unknowingly, which is valuable information for an identity thief or a predator. A tip for parents is to ask your child to show you how to set up a social network on either MySpace or Face book. The exchange her is your child shares with you the technology side, which you will find is not as frightening as you thought. Moreover, you can share with your child the wisdom of what is out there on the Internet and some clues on what to look for, like someone being too personal, aggressive, or forward.

As Mike stated, an education and the practice of good principles is a great foundation and extension of enjoying the Internet safely.

There are a great deal of concerns for children on the Internet, however; those concerns are far less threatening if parents teach their children good solid principles to adhere to while on the Internet.

Parents need to be informed, which in turn will empower them to help their children as they grow into responsible cybercitizens. After two years of research and interviews with authorities from around the world, Bill and I have compiled an eBook, “Discover The 17 Steps To Internet Parenting”. These are topics you may or may not be aware of, which you or your children can fall prey to. We do not need any more statistics about tragedies befalling families.

david c ballard