For every family – blended or not – losing a child is a nightmare. Last week Bonnie Todd got up at 3 a.m. and baked a birthday cake for her 17-year old daughter, Cyndi Lamb. But Cyndi wasn’t there to blow out the candles.

Cyndi Lamb has been missing since October 30th from Molalla, Oregon and police say that leads in her case are drying up. Her stepfather frets that someone is hurting her and he can’t bear to go to the library – the last place the girl was seen.

TV channel KOIN-6 reported that detectives found more than 30,000 emails to Cyndi Lamb on computers at the library and in her home discussing relationship issues. Her best friend said that she quarreled with Lamb over her desire to meet in person the men that she met online.

Molalla Police Chief Nicholas Kelsey published a letter in The Oregonian thanking the community and advising families to educate their children about online predators. He revealed that many of the people Lamb met online were registered sex offenders, saying, “I knew that Internet chat rooms and telephone chat rooms were used to contact youngsters, but until this case, I did not realize that these constitute such a playground for pedophiles.”

As a stepmom to teenagers who enjoy chatting online, I find the Lamb case to be both chilling and a wake-up call. According to a report issued in 2000 titled “Online Victimization: A Report on the Nation’s Youth, approximately one in five children receive a sexual solicitation or approach through the internet within the past year. One in 33 children received an aggressive solicitor online – someone who offered them money, gifts, called them on the phone or asked to meet them somewhere.

It’s time for families to get involved with their kids’ internet activities and to take responsibility for educating them about online safety. While you may be tempted to pull the plug on your kids’ or stepkids’ internet use altogether – that’s not practical in today’s high-tech society. Even if you don’t own a computer at home, your child can go online at a friend’s house or a library. In our home, the computer used by the kids is kept in a high traffic area between the kitchen and living room – making it easier to supervise internet activities and to talk with the kids about who they are chatting with online.

Rather than isolating our children, we need to teach them how to recognize suspicious behavior and we need to educate ourselves. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has an excellent series of online educational activities for children and teens called NetSmartz that you can go through with your child or teen. You can also read internet safety tips for teens and kids or take an adult safety quiz to test your own knowledge.

If you don’t have a computer at home or want to review printed information, NCMEC also has a series of publications on internet safety for children and teens. They are available for free by calling NCMEC’s CyberTipline toll-free 24 hours a day at 1-800-843-5678 or visiting www.cybertipline.com.  Many publications are available in both English and Spanish, and you can order extra copies to share with friends and co-parents. Next week we’ll be discussing how to report suspicious internet communications to authorities and more steps you can take to keep your children safer.

If you have information about Cyndi Lamb, call Molalla Police at (503) 829-8817. More information, sketches and photos are available online at the KOIN News website and a printable poster is available from NCMEC

Dawn Miller writes a column on life in blended families at thestepfamilylife.com. 
Visit Dawn's blog for a daily dose of life in the blender.
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