Adopt a No-Secrets Family Policy

We break down how a simple guideline – no secrets in our family – turns kids into confident reporters. From team sports to online chats, we walk through a safety scale showing how prevention happens as we trace the grooming playbook from “small” secrets to predatory behavior.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why No Secrets Matters
• 2:54 From Exposure To Conversation: The Next Talk 10
• 6:26 The 0–10 Safety Scale
• 9:44 Spotting Grooming: Small Secrets To Big Harm
• 13:17 Online Predators And “Our Little Secret”
• 16:30 Teaching Kids The Red Flag Rule
• 19:11 Secrets vs Surprises For Young Kids
• 22:06 Grandparents And Safe Boundaries

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to the Next Talk Podcast. We are a nonprofit passionate about keeping kids safe online. We're learning together how to navigate tech, culture, and faith with our kids. Adopt a no secrets family policy. This is a critical practice to protect your kids from things like online grooming, online predators, sexual abuse, porn. The list goes on. Very, very important that your kids don't keep secrets from you. And I'm gonna explain why throughout this show. But first, I want to review adopt a no secrets family policy is part of our next talk 10. Now, I want to remind you of what the next talk 10 means. So over this decade-long journey that I've been on of trying to protect my kids, one of the things I noticed is that they got exposed to inappropriate content, whether they had technology or not. And so I realized, you know, the whole concept is not when are we going to give our kid a phone. It's really just how are we going to protect them in an overexposed world, like this digital world that they're growing up in where they have access to anything and everything. So I started out on a solution to try and figure out what is the answer. And as you guys know, you know, I realized right away delaying the phone till my kids were 30, it wasn't gonna work because they were still getting exposed to things even before they had phones. So God led me to Deuteronomy 6, 6, and 7. And that scripture says that we are supposed to talk with our kids when we're getting up, when we're going to bed, when we're at home, and when we're on the go. Four key times where God is calling us to create a culture of open communication in our homes. And so as I set out on that journey to create this new culture of conversation in my own home, what happened was these 10 core practices started coming together. And I had to do these 10 things really well to change the relationship with my kids, you know, so that it went from kind of surface level to a relationship where we talked about everything. No topic was off women's. They could ask me their awkward questions and tell me what was going on in their friend group. And so these 10 best practices started to form. And I write about these in Keeping Kids Safe in a Digital World, my book. But these next talk 10, they are best practices to change the culture in your home, to get your kids talking to you. And therefore, that is the solution that keeps them safe online and off. So adopting no secrets family policy is part of that next talk 10. It's a critical part. And I want to talk to you about why this principle is so important. First of all, I want you to think of a scale of zero to 10. 10 is where your kid is in a crisis mode. So 10 could be your kid has been sexually abused. 10 could be your kid is trafficked, has been trafficked. 10 could be your kid has a porn addiction. Okay. So we help families like that in crisis at next talk. But really the heartbeat behind next talk is over here at one, two, three, and four, right? On this scale, we want to prevent the 10 from happening. At one, two, three, and four through conversations, through awareness, through education, right? And so we're trying to prevent the crisis. That's why we're trying to reach families with five-year-olds. Because if you can get ahead of this, your probability of preventing the 10 from happening is more likely because you're doing more preventative work. So in this scale of zero to 10, I want you to think of as a 10. So a kid is physically sexually abused by somebody they know in real life. Okay. And for this example, we're going to say it's a football coach. Over here at one, two, three, and four, there are warning signs that if we would have seen, we could have prevented the sexual abuse from happening. So you've got a fifth grade boy, he plays football. And at step number one, he comes home from practice and he says, Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, mom. The coach is dropping the F bomb at practice a lot. And he's saying, Don't tell your parents. Old Mandy would have called the coach, group texted all the moms, like, signed a petition, like, we got to get a control of this. New Mandy would do none of that. Okay. New Mandy trying to create a Deuteronomy 6, 6, and 7 culture in our home where we can talk about anything through these next top 10 practices. New Mandy says to my son, Thank you so much for telling me. I don't think it's appropriate that coaches using the F-word with fifth graders. Can I please call him? Oh my gosh, mom, no, that's so embarrassing. Please don't call coach. Okay, son, I'm gonna respect your wishes. I'm not gonna call coach. But I need you to hear me. More than even the cuss word, I'm very alarmed that a grown man is asking kids to keep secrets from their parents. That is a red flag. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna move the coach from the green light to the yellow light. Okay? Envision a stoplight. So if coach asks you to keep another secret from me, you're gonna tell me, right? Yes, mom. Yes, mom, I will tell you. Okay, son, it's you and me. We're working together to keep you safe, but you have to keep telling me. All right, mom. So after um a small secret like that, what we typically see with groomers is over here at two, three, and four, they start implementing some kind of substances to our kids. Now it could be vaping, it could be alcohol, it could be drugs, whatever it is. But for this example, let's just say at two or three, football coach says to your son, Hey, have you ever had beer? I have a can in my car and I'll give you a sip. But if you tell anyone, I will lose my job, I won't be able to be your football coach anymore. I could go to jail. So it has to be our secret. Parents, I need you to hear this. If your son takes a sip of that alcohol and coach does not get a call from you, coach knows he can do whatever he wants with your son because your son is not talking to you. I use this example because I've seen it happen over and over again. Groomers vet out our kids by asking them to keep little secrets from us, but they turn into big ones. So on the scale of zero to 10, it may have started with a cuss word and then it moves into a substance. You know what normally comes next? Nude photos, exchanging nude photos, and then pornography, watching pornography. And then it eventually ends up with 10 where your kid is physically then sexually abused, and all of it is abuse and grooming, but but you you've you see the scale that it's happened. And Next Talk is trying to prevent that 10 from happening at this two, three, and four by education and awareness. I would work so many of these cases early on and hear these stories. And I remember telling my husband, and when we first started on the journey, my son was six years old. And I remember Matt saying to me, You can't tell our six-year-old these stories. It's gonna scare him to death. He's never gonna want to leave our house. And so one night Matt said, Why don't we just make a rule since you're seeing all this grooming and they're asking them to keep secrets? Why don't we just make this rule, no secrets in our family? It became kind of a catchphrase that we use. We have no secrets, we have no secrets in our family. And I would see this over and over again with grooming in person. But also, I started to see it online. So let me tell you what I mean by that. Online predators would somehow get access to kids, and they can do it through online chats and Roblox or Instagram DMs or even through the Xbox, a chat feature. And, you know, it would be harmless at first. Like they would just talk with him and laugh with him and like make a friend. But then eventually something would start to happen. Like maybe the groomer would say, Hey, why don't you wear red today and I'll wear red and let's not tell anybody and let's take our picture and share our picture with each other. That seems so harmless, right? But what is Predator doing there? Predator is actually training your kid that, like, it's me and you against the world, and we have a little secret world over here that nobody else knows about. Wear red, take the picture, but don't tell anybody. This is why a no secrets family policy can save your kid from abuse, from predators, from grooming, from so much. I see this over and over again with kids. When I trace back their messages online, when we trace back how the abuse may have happened, it always starts with this little secret. Don't tell your parents. So what we would do is I would literally tell my kids when they were little. I wouldn't tell them these big grooming stories because I didn't want to scare them. But what I would say is if anyone ever asks you to keep a secret from your parents, a red flag alert should go off in your brain to come home and tell your parents. Right? And that was just something that we instilled in our kids from an early, early age. Now, I do want to say this. When your kids are little, and I mean like implement this when they're two, three, and four. Like it's a very easy thing to say because you're not giving them any scary information. It's just we have no secrets in our family. We have no secrets in our family. Now, just leave it at that. Just a catch all. As your kids get older, they may start to ask you certain things. Like, well, the surprise party we're going to, like, that's a secret. What's the difference? So, what's the difference between a secret and a surprise? As your kids get older and they ask this, here's a simple explanation. A secret stays a secret forever. A surprise has an end date. So the birthday party will happen on this date. The gift will be given on Christmas. Whatever it is, a surprise will eventually come out into the open. A secret is different. A secret is we're not going to tell anybody ever. So don't give that broad explanation if they're not asking for it, but I want you to be prepared when they do start asking. Also, grandparents. I used to love the clause, what happens at grandma's stays at grandma's, until we implemented this rule. And you guys, we have to be so careful with this. One time I picked my kids up from a sleepover at their grandparents. And my son, we had implemented this rule and he was still really little, you know, kindergarten, first grade. And I picked him up and we were driving home, and he was like fidgety in the back seat, like something was wrong. And all of a sudden, like he just kept moving around and twisting, and he didn't know, like I could just feel like something was bothering him. And out of the blue, he just he just blurted out real fast. We had eight popsicles for breakfast, and Gigi told me not to tell you. Now listen, everything in me wanted to just start laughing right then, right? Because it's funny. And I I think Gigi's fine. Gigi's a safe person. But you know what? If I would have dismissed him telling me and I laughed it off because it's Gigi, what happens the next time he may be at Uncle's house or a cousin's house, he is asked from that family member to keep a secret and it's something serious or one of these steps in the grooming process. Is he going to get confused because I laughed it off? So here's how I ended up handling that. I said, Oh, Bubba, thank you so much for telling me. When I contacted my mom and my in-laws, here's what I want you to know. I was not mad at them. I didn't yell at them. I wasn't confrontational. The conversation went like, hey, I know you're not aware of this, but our kids are growing up in a very digital world. Even if I don't give them phones, people are using secrets to groom our kids into sexual abuse, or they're grooming them into very bad behaviors. And so one of the ways to keep your grandkids safe is we've adopted a no secrets family policy in our home. And what that means is just mom, dad, brother, sister, we have no secrets in our family. So here's what I want you to know, grandparents. I want you to spoil your grandkids. Give them a popsicles for breakfast. It's fine. You've earned that right. I want them to have fun with you. But what I please don't want you to do is tell them that they need to keep it a secret from me. That is a big red flag in our home. And we're trying to teach them to tell us everything they're seeing and hearing, and it will protect them. So actually, grandparents, you have a part to play in this. So if your grandkids ever tell you something and they say, don't tell mom or dad, or this is our little secret, you can reinforce this and be like, oh, you need to tell your parents. Like I would encourage you to tell your parents. And if they don't, grandparents work behind the scenes to tell the parents themselves. And the grandparents and the and the parents can work together, exchange information that the kids are giving them, and don't tell the kids. But it's a way for you guys to all work together to keep the kids safe in your family. The other thing, too, you know, I say the grandparent thing, you're gonna get all kinds of weird things when you adopt a no secrets family policy. And I just want to give you some tools to manage that because I think it does more harm if we say we have no secrets in our family, and then our kids come home and they share silly stuff with us and then we dismiss it, they get super confused. Well, then I don't tell you. And then your words start to not matter either because you're not following through on what you asked them to report to you. So one time too, my my son, he was in kinder. I do remember he was in kinder this time. Uh, he jumped in the car after school. And when we implemented the no secrets in our in our family, I noticed right away that um the kids responded differently to it, right? So my son, he was one of those where he would jump in the car after school. And before we made it out of the school parking lot, like he would download everything, like cuss words that were being said, new words he had heard, you know, any kind of secret he was asked to keep. He would just download it. It was almost like confessional time. Like I've been holding it on, and then I gotta tell you all this, and now I'm done. Now I'm free from it, which I loved. It was really cute. But one day he jumped in the car and he said, Mom, you're never gonna believe this. My teacher got so mad at us today, and she turned out the lights and she said, put your heads on your desk and you're gonna take a nap for 15 minutes because we need some quiet and you are not gonna tell your parents. Now he told me that because we had just implemented this guideline and he was like, She asked me to keep a secret from you. Now, I was laughing inside because I know his kindergarten teacher, I'm friends with his kindergarten teacher, and I'm thinking to myself, if I was her, I would have asked them to sleep all day. Like, how does she do it? Like, that's what's going through my mind, right? I thought it was just so funny, but that's not what I said. Because if I would have dismissed it again, then my rules start to be blurred and they get confused about what they're supposed to tell me or not tell me. So my response to him that day was, oh, buddy, thank you so much for telling me. You know, I think Mrs. So-and-so is a safe person, but we're gonna move her from the green light to the yellow light. So if she asks you to keep another secret from me, will you tell me? Yeah, okay, mom, I will. We're working together to keep you safe. Nothing ever happened again with that teacher because that teacher was a safe teacher. It was just a little clause that she used, you know, that we all kind of are guilty of sometimes not thinking it through. I've also been, you guys, I served as a camp camp counselor for years at church camp, and I loved working with the kids and pouring into them. Oh my gosh, I just learned so much from them. But, you know, one time we were at camp and I remember one of the pastors standing on stage, one of the guest pastors, and he was joking, and he said, I know you guys are all hyped up on sugar. You know, make sure you don't tell your parents how much sugar you're eating at camp. And it was all, you know, like fun music and we're all jumping up and down. He meant nothing by it. I truly believe he's a safe person. But I share this example because if you're leading children, if you're teaching children, make sure that you're not asking them to keep secrets from their parents because that's grooming tactic one-on-one. And as parents, we are trying to get our kids to talk to us and tell us these things. So we're going to implement and adopt this no secrets family policy. I need everybody else in the community leading kids to back us up on that. Always try and be like, okay, go tell your parents that. Have you talked to your mom and dad about that? That is the kind of dialogue that we need in our community so that we're pointing kids to their parents. Now, I know, I know that there are unsafe parents. And I know there are situations when kids start to confide in adults around them where we have to report the parents. Like I understand that. But for the most part, most parents are trying to do the best we can do. And so this will help protect our kids from online strangers, from abusers in real person. And it's just an easy way to tell kids no secrets in our family. Now, I have one disclaimer I want to talk about before we wrap up on this show. And I get asked this a lot when I talk about this section at events is what if your child tells you something and asks you not to tell the other parent? So, for example, one of the questions I get a lot is from um moms who say, My daughter is crushing on this boy. She started her period, whatever, something girly. And she told me and confided in me, which is great, but she said, Please don't tell dad. Okay. So here's how we handle that in our home. I would say to my daughter, thank you so much for telling me. I'm so glad I'm your safe place. Dad and I, we don't have secrets. The Bible says we are one. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let dad know what's going on. But I'm gonna tell dad that you don't want to talk to him about this. And so he's not gonna bring it up with you. Dads who are listening, please don't bring it up with your daughter. If you do, that tells your daughter you don't respect her boundaries. She's less likely to confide in you. However, and I've seen this in my own home with my own husband honoring this boundary and just not bringing it up and being like, okay, Mandy's gonna handle that with her. I know it's handled. I don't need to address it, right? I don't need to bring it up with her because it embarrasses her to talk to me about this. Listen, when you do that, when you honor your kids' boundary, they are actually probably gonna be more likely to confide in you about that very thing. Like I've seen it in my own home. And the same thing with my son talking to my husband about certain things and telling my husband, please don't tell mom this is embarrassing or whatever, right? Matt would then say, I don't keep secrets from your mom, but mom will honor that boundary. And then I have to honor that boundary. I have just seen it over and over again. When you honor the boundary, then the kid actually does start talking to you about that very thing that they thought was going to be embarrassing to you because they felt respected. Your kid felt heard and respected, and you were gonna honor the boundary of not bringing it up. We just want one parent being able to pour into that kid about that subject, right? And so we just never want kids struggling in silence or being alone or feeling shame. And that's why the conversations are so important. So adopt a no secrets family policy in your home. Guys, this one simple step can protect your kids from so much. I mean, like major stuff, protecting your kids from abuse, grooming, trafficking, but also just normal everyday stuff, too, like um going to the neighbor's house and porn popping up and don't tell your parents, or or um going to a sleepover and somebody saying something inappropriate and or watching an inappropriate movie and saying don't tell your parents, everyday things like that, too. It is gonna protect your kids from so much. It's one easy step. It's part of the Next Talk 10. And if you implement these 10 things in your home, your kids are gonna be safer online and off.

SPEAKER_00: 22:42

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