Prepare your children for the people they will meet.
Adults Saving Kids trains parents, grandparents and congregations to raise young people who are perceptive, wise and hard to deceive — not merely watched over, but ready.
Founded by a Minnesota pastor after his own daughter was taken by a trafficker. Every lesson is free.
3
courses, built to be taught in a living room or a church basement
30+
sessions, each with a leader’s guide and handouts
6
parenting skills that build on one another, in order
$0
the cost to your family or your congregation
The problem we keep meeting
Your child will be approached by someone who has practiced.
Traffickers, predators and every other kind of schemer rehearse their approach. They study what a lonely fifteen-year-old wants to hear. Most families have never rehearsed anything.
Family leaders no longer hold the influence they once did, and that has left young people far more exposed. Protecting a child — watching, restricting, worrying — is not the same as preparing one. Preparation is a skill, it can be taught, and the people best placed to teach it are the ones already at the kitchen table.
“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”Matthew 10:16
“To teach shrewdness to the simple, knowledge and prudence to the young.”Proverbs 1:4
Where to begin
Find the door that fits you.
Parents & grandparents
Six skills, one at a time
Start with communication and work up through boundaries, discernment, intuition, consequences and media. Each skill stands on the one below it.
Pastors & church leaders
A ministry you already have
Thirty-plus sessions across three courses, with leader’s guides, written material and questionnaires. Run it as an adult forum or a midweek series.
Youth workers & teens
Hear it from people who were there
Former traffickers and sellers, and survivors who lived it, explain exactly how recruitment works. Oprah Winfrey and ABC 20/20 both drew on this footage.
The front porch
Six parenting skills, built like a set of steps.
You cannot ask a child to weigh consequences before they will talk to you. Each skill rests on the one before it, which is why we teach them in order — and why we draw them as a porch you climb.
Why this exists
In 1987, a trafficker took his daughter.
Al Erickson had already spent a lifetime in ministry — six years among fifty-five villages in Papua New Guinea, seven years pastoring in Mott, North Dakota, fourteen years in a hard neighborhood of Minneapolis.
None of it prepared him for what happened to his third daughter. She was recruited by a trafficker. Years later she died of burns from a fire that traced back, in part, to what had been done to her.
Al founded Adults Saving Kids and spent fourteen years as its director. He worked with three former traffickers and recorded what they knew. He helped the Christian Science Monitor, the Oprah Winfrey Show and ABC 20/20 understand how the trade actually works. He is still teaching.
Give
Five hundred dollars trains a whole congregation.
We are entirely volunteer, and it costs about $500 a month to keep the doors open. A $500 gift sponsors one congregation through the full curriculum — and we will tell you which one.
“Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray.”Proverbs 22:6