As a parent, nothing scares me more than losing a child. I know that sort of sounds silly but I don’t know of a parent out there who hasn’t had at least one or two scares. This past weekend, my wife and I took the three kids to the mall. The oldest stayed with mom in the Pottery Barn and I was out in the main area with the middle child (4 yrs old) and the baby. While I was putting the baby’s shoes back on his feet, my son started wandering back through the mall looking for mommy. I turned my head for an instance and he had wandered off. You want to talk about freaking out. This was it!
Needless to say, I was on pins and needles most of the day…..Nathan tends to wander, wherever we go. It doesn’t matter how many times we try to explain it to him, he just wanders, it is what he does. I started thinking about families with autistic children. Last week, we had a lady call the company who was looking for something that could help her monitor her child. She has an autistic child that tends to wander in and out of his room all night. The previous night, her child had walk out of his room in the middle of the night and hid in the closet where she did not find him until the next morning. She practically had a nervous breakdown.
We did two things for her. One was to recommend that she visit the website of the National Autism Foundation. They have a great page on safety for autistic children. If your child is not autistic, I would recommend taking a look at these safety tips anyway. Secondly, we recommended the Voice Alert 6. This what’s called a voice annunciation system. You record a message for up to 6 zones. Each of the zones can have an unlimited number of monitoring devices tied to it. For instance, in this situation, I would put a PIR based motion detector over the bedroom d0or. When motion is detected (the child leaving the room for example) a wireless signal is sent to the speaker/receiver. Then it would play a message your recorded like “movement at front door” to which you could investigate. You could also put a vibration sensor on gate or fence. If vibration is detected, or the gate is opened, the receiver would play a different message that you have recorded. With six different zones, this is a very dynamic system. This is a very easy to use exit alarm that is a breeze to install and set up. Six zones gives you plenty of room to grow the system. You can add as many PIR motion sensors and vibration sensors per zone as you would like.
It is better to be safe than sorry. We have the VA6000S-A installed at our home to monitor any areas we want notice of to ensure our kids safety. They will wander, I just want to be there to find them!
-James
