The talks most parents dread. Ready before you need them.

The three ways out of a situation, in the vaping lesson. The face-saving no, the exit line that blames me, and a code word. We picked our code word in the car on the way to Kmart. Took four minutes. My son thought it was hilarious and a bit cool. Six weeks later he used it at a party. I picked him up, said nothing in the car like you said, and he told me the whole thing the next morning on his own.

I'm going to say something about lesson seven and then stop. My daughter had been flat for about a month and I'd been telling myself it was hormones. That lesson tells you to ask plainly, using the actual word, and that asking doesn't plant the idea. I did not believe that second part until it was explained. I asked. She answered. We saw our GP the following day and we're getting help. I don't know what else to say about a nineteen dollar add-on.

Very good and I'm glad I have it. One thing though — seven minutes is not enough for the sex and bodies one. The three steps are right. Find out what they know, give the facts, say what our family thinks. But my daughter asks follow-up questions I wasn't ready for and the lesson doesn't go that far. Everything else is well-pitched. That one needs to be twice as long, or needs a second part.

The thing that got me was being told what not to do. Don't contact the other child's parents. Don't take their phone off them when they tell you about something online. Don't promise to keep a secret before you know what it is. Every one of those is a thing I would have done, confidently, thinking I was helping. I've had this a fortnight and most of the value so far has been in things I've stopped doing.

Opposite problem to what you'd expect. I bought this thinking it was early. My son is twelve. He'd already seen porn on another kid's phone at a sleepover, months ago, and never told me. I found out because of lesson three — not because I interrogated him, but because I asked what he'd heard about something and he decided the conversation was safe. 'Thanks for telling me, you're not in trouble.' I had that sentence ready because the lesson gave it to me. I would not have had it otherwise.

The free pass. That's it, that's the review. We said it out loud at dinner — you can always call, I'll come and get you, I won't be angry, no questions that night. My eldest asked if that was true even if she'd done something she shouldn't have. Yes. That's the whole point. She's got it on her lock screen now.

The specific Australian services are what make this worth it. Kids Helpline, eSafety, the reporting site for when an adult has contacted a child, triple zero. I've lived here eleven years and I did not know most of those existed or which one does what. Having them named in the lesson, in order, with what each one is for, is more useful to me than any of the advice. I've written them in my phone.

Good, and I'd buy it again, with one gripe. The What would you do if game. My son is thirteen and clocked immediately that it was a parenting thing. 'Did this come from your course.' Dead on arrival. The car audio about who to tell worked much better because he didn't know it was coming. Lead with the audio, bury the game.

Grandmother raising two. I bought this one before I bought the main program, which I gather is backwards. Lesson eight is the best seven minutes of anything I've watched this year. The telling matters more than the thing they've told you. Thank them first, then ask whether they want help or just want you to listen. I got that wrong for thirty years with my own kids. I'm not getting it wrong again.

The online risk lesson taught me a pattern I'd never have spotted. Someone who's suddenly very nice, wants a private chat, asks to keep it secret, asks for a photo. Any one of those and you stop and tell an adult. I taught it to my daughter as a list, exactly like that, and she repeated it back to me a week later unprompted. Also the instruction not to save a photo even as proof, and where to report instead. I'd have got that badly wrong.

I bought it hoping I would never need it, which I suspect is how most people buy this. Six weeks in, I've used exactly one thing from it: the two sentences in the last lesson, when my daughter told me something about a friend that frightened her. Thanks for telling me. Do you want help working out what to do, or do you want me to just listen? She wanted me to just listen. Six months ago I'd have gone straight into fixing it and she'd have stopped telling me things.

Bought it at checkout for nineteen dollars without really thinking, mostly because the vaping one caught my eye. Then I didn't open it for three weeks. Not because I forgot. Because I didn't want to think about any of it. When I finally did, the first lesson is about how to have these talks at all — small ones, side by side, long before you need them — and that took about 80% of the dread out of it. I'd been imagining one enormous sit-down conversation. It's not that at all.