Child safety business educates, responds

This News By You business profile was submitted by Jose Villa.

Child Shield, U.S.A.

Owner, age: Jose Villa, 40.

Business address, phone, Web site: Home-based business, 602-400-7504, www.childshieldusa.com/halo.

Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday.

What this business offers: The Child Shield, U.S.A. program provides parents with educational materials to help them talk to their children about strangers and what to do if someone tries to abduct them.

Child Shield, U.S.A. helps parents record an identification video of their child and provide secret identification code labels and a pre-addressed mailer so the video can anonymously be added to the Child Shield database.

If a child is missing, a parent activates the recovery service. The program immediately posts a $50,000 reward, duplicates and distributes the identification video and color posters to more than 16,000 law-enforcement agencies nationwide, and a professional private investigator will be on the scene in hours. The Child Shield, U.S.A. also includes a monthly subscription to "The Shield" child safety newsletter.

How did you decide to start this business? In the 20 years I have been in the safety and security business, I have seen parents that are uneducated and unrealistic about the safety of their children. Parents have a false sense of security with fingerprint and ID cards. In reality, these types of systems only provide a means to identify a body.

In my graduate work, I performed an informal survey regarding child safety from parents. My results concluded that they overwhelming believe that the key is education, but many do not know where to get it. I researched several companies that provide child-safety programs and found that they included either a documenting form, like fingerprint cards or a recovery system, like Amber alerts. None of the systems had both, except Child Shield, U.S.A.

I feel that Child Shield, U.S.A. offers parents a complete package and more peace of mind.

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