Protect Your Child Online

Were you calmly sitting at home listening to the radio when your adopted child suddenly announced that her birth mother or father had found her on Facebook?  This kind of thing can give you a heart attack and send you rushing to find anything you can about adoption and birth record data.

State Adoption and Birth Records

All adoptive parents have a twinge about their child finding her birth parents.  This is natural–anxiety and jealousy–and nothing to be concerned about.  It’s the possibility of the child being harmed emotionally or physically by someone who is not the birth parent–or worse, someone who is.

Most adopted children, no matter how happy, have curiosity about their birth parents.  Again, this is natural, but leaves them open to various types of predators that have found a huge playground on the internet. Your Department of Health, Office of Vital Statistics has records of anyone adopted in that state.

By accessing these public records, you may be able to get more data on the birth parents, and even do things like run a background or criminal history check to at least verify the person’s identity.

Private Adoption Records

Private adoptions are much harder to access and generally require contacting the law firm that initially handled it.  This can also lead to other difficulties.

If you don’t have the time to work through bureaucratic red tape, there are records sites that can find this data very quickly and help you determine if your child is at risk.  Find adoption and birth records without all the hassle of contacting local county or state agencies.

With the advent of the computer age, a host of websites dedicated to connecting people with similar hobbies, experience and interests has come. Many people, young and old use these sites to communicate with each other for potential employment opportunities, but the issue of proving age and providing birth cert information may arise for people close to the age of 18.

Most high school kids would embrace the opportunity to be able to work a few hours after school or work consistently during the summer to save money for college.

These opportunities are not as abundant as in the past due to the recent economic times, but they are out there. Social networking sites can actually serve as a job networking tools and are worth considering.

Employers Ask For Birth Records

It is of course important to have an open dialogue with your child during online searches for potential jobs. Follow up on any potential employer and make sure they are a reputable establishment.

In turn, that employer may ask for some proof of age from your child if they think the two of them would be a good fit. They are protecting their assets, as you want to protect your child.

At this point, it is up to the parent to provide some form of proof of age if their child is at least 18-years old of course. Because there is no age verification feature on most websites, a parent sometimes has to provide birth certificate information to protect their child’s right to work.

How to Search for Lost Birth Certificates

If your child is looking for a job, and you don’t have a copy of his or her birth certificate, you can request a copy at the courthouse in the state where your child was born. The earlier a child can get employed at a workplace, the earlier a sense of responsibility is established. A positive work ethic can pay big dividends both financially and socially.

If you want to have access to your child’s birth records without requesting a copy in person, there are many online resources that can help you. Find birth cert information here.   Either way, good luck in helping your teenager land their first job!

Your child could be a victim of indentify fraud because people now have access to hospital birth records. It may seem a little early to monitor your child’s credit rating before they even have a credit card.  Hopefully, when they try to apply for a student loan, they won’t find out that they are $25,000 in debt.

From the time your kid is assigned a legal identity, that identity is vulnerable.  For some scammers, it doesn’t matter very much if they are dealing with somebody with a credit history or someone who is too young to have a credit history.

We’ve all heard of kids getting credit offers, recruitment for the military, and being assigned to jury duty. Therefore, you can only imagine what somebody with his or her identity could accomplish.

How to Investigate People

If you are concerned that you child’s information has ended up in the wrong hands, you can obtain access to the same records that are available to the public by choosing trusted online services with databases of vital records.

Unfortunately, your child’s birth records are a matter of public record. Once this information is in the hands of criminals, they can use your child’s information to make purchases and destroy your child’s credit before they even get to junior high.

Another unfortunate thing to note is that the crime often goes unnoticed until the child tries to buy a car or enroll in college. This leaves criminals with a 15-year crime spree that can go undetected by parents and authorities.

How to Find Birth Records

Birth records like death records and marriage records are part of what’s called vital records. You can get this information confidentially and quickly.

Every parent is doing their best to save money for their child’s education. Don’t let this kind of scam pull the rug out from under you financially. Start by searching hospital birth records to see exactly what is available to the public.

Identity fraud is not just used for financial scams as a fake birth certificate story shows. A recent story on MSNBC revealed the ease at which a 52-year-old man was able to use a fake birth certificate to attend a high school in Waterford, Connecticut.

It turned out that he was using the experience to write a book on the glaring flaws in our national security systems. If he could do it, how do we know if anyone is whom they say they are?

It’s every parent’s nightmare to think that institutions like the public school system are vulnerable to the threat that identity theft presents. While most of us worry about the threat identity theft poses to our credit rating, it must be acknowledged that there are far more valuable things in this world to protect.

Try a People Search–Don’t Get Lulled into Ambivalence

We assume that at a place such as a school there are strong security mechanisms to prevent someone with a fake birth certificate from getting a job (or certainly enrolling).

As parents we walk a fine line between overprotection and due diligence. Every parent remembers the first time our kid had a certain look that made us want to call a doctor in the middle of the night. Hopefully, there was nothing really wrong with the child, but it was still the right thing to do.

Investigate a Hunch with a Background Check

When you are a parent, you should get in the habit of playing a hunch. If your child’s teacher, coach or friends strike you as someone that could be posing a danger to your kid, you can’t rely on the school system to do their own research. It is definitely something that should change in our schools until that happens we, as parents, need to protect our own kids.

How You Can Request Criminal Records

Criminal records are a matter of public records, and you can request them in person at the courthouse responsible for records in your county. If you don’t have time to a visit in person, you can also obtain the same information online.

And it is a quick and inexpensive tool to give us some piece of mind in a crazy society. Lookup the suspected fake birth certificate and background check to see if the story makes sense.  You can search anyone you suspect as long as you have a first and last name.