Microchipping Our Children At School?

Hmmm....microchipping our children? Would you do it? Apparently, our schools and - believe it or not - the FDA thinks this is a great concept...

The image that you see here is a pet microchip. This is what we normally think about when the word "microchip" is mentioned. Millions of us have microchipped our dogs, cats, bunnies and several other of our precious pets that have a tendency to roam. And, for your pets, the microchip system seems to be working better than not using them at all.

So, why not do it to our children? Missing kids are constantly being reported every day...wouldn't it be great if we could just tap into the GPS inside the microchip that is implanted in the child and....Viola! Location found, child found. Quickly and painlessly. The whole "missing kid" issue is over. No more missing kids on milk cartons and posted on Wal-Mart walls. No more sad stories on the evening news about authorities finding the body of a child near a...

Not So Fast!

But, the microchip system for pets is still being modified, refined, and improved...and we've been microchipping our pets for over two decades now! In addition, the pet microchip system functions in a "responsive" way, rather than in real-time. In other words, a pet has to be found before the microchip can be scanned and the pet's owner's information can be extracted from the database. What if the pet was stuck somewhere and never found? The pet microchip system wouldn't help that scenario at all.

So, the microchip system for children will most likely require a lot of experimenting and hundreds - if not thousands - of live guinea pigs to start the whole experimentation process off. Whose kids are going to be the guinea pigs? Certainly not mine, let me tell you. What would the side effects be for humans? Would there be radioactivity involved for the tracking system? What about reactions?

There are too many "What If's" for me on this topic.

Would You Microchip Your Child?

Really, would you do it? I am completely tossed up on this whole notion. Would I microchip my children? Honestly, at this point in time, I would have to say, "No." Until the local, state, and national government agencies designed and implemented a nationwide microchip initiative that has amazing technological, including GPS, abilities that were proven to work in every case (or 99.9% of cases), I would stand my ground about not microchipping my little ones.
 
I'm not saying that the idea is bad at all...I'm simply stating that I don't think we are anywhere near ready to start implanting any chip into our kid's bodies. 

However, if there was already a system that was proven to work if a child was lost, I would have to seriously grant the concept a second thought. 

Did you know that schools are microchipping children?

If your child's school is microchipping your child, you most likely know it already. There are a few schools now participating in this microchip theory...but it's not as bad as you think. They are not inserting the microchips into the kid's bodies at this point in time...they are simply putting the microchips in backpacks and sewing them into the pockets of shirts to track the children in school. I was actually surprised to see how well their tracking systems works with this technology. (Check out CNN for the video.)  The monitors function in real-time and the teachers feel like they can spend less time "keeping track" of children and more time teaching and nurturing. 

The idea is spreading like an epidemic, as there are now many schools joining the microchip venture. Unfortunately, there are always problems and issues with technology and the new systems that rely on it.

What happens when the system goes down or is unusable or malfunctions without the knowledge of the school? Is the safety of the children jeopardized because the teachers are no longer consciously monitoring the children as they normally would? Will our children really be safer? I guess we'll just have to sit back and see.

I Think I'll Pass...

In the meantime, while all of the initial studies, tracking and reporting are being conducted, I'll have to decline the microchip for my own children and stick to the old-fashioned method of physically keeping track of them (which is like second nature to a parent, anyway) for the time being.