Legal
Effective date: September 22, 2026
ValueOurKids respects your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect when you use the ValueOurKids website, how we use and share that information, and the choices available to you.
ValueOurKids is a parenting resource designed primarily for parents and caregivers. We aim to collect only the information reasonably needed to provide the site’s resources and features.
You may provide information to ValueOurKids in several ways.
If you use our Contact form, we collect the information you choose to provide, including:
We use this information to respond to your inquiry and communicate with you about your request.
Please do not include sensitive personal, medical, or other information that is not necessary for us to respond to your message.
ValueOurKids allows parents and caregivers to share experiences about approaches that helped their families.
If you submit a What Worked for Parents story, we may collect:
We also collect your permission to review and potentially publish your submission.
Please avoid including your child’s name or other identifying or highly sensitive information about your child or family.
Every submission is reviewed before publication. We may lightly edit, organize, categorize, or prepare submissions for publication while seeking to preserve the meaning of the parent’s experience.
If a story is published, the story information you submitted, your child’s age range, and any name or nickname you chose to use may become publicly visible. Technical information collected with the form, such as your IP address or browser information, is not published.
If you use our parenting-guidance search, we collect the question or search text you enter.
For your family’s privacy, please do not include names or other identifying details in a search question.
Search results provide general parenting information and are not a substitute for professional medical, mental-health, legal, or other professional advice.
When you submit certain forms, including the Contact form and What Worked for Parents form, our form system automatically records technical information associated with the submission.
Depending on the submission, this may include:
We use this information to operate the forms, maintain records, troubleshoot problems, protect the site from misuse, and support the security and administration of ValueOurKids.
Ordinary anonymous browsing of the site does not currently use analytics or advertising trackers.
We use information collected through ValueOurKids to:
We do not sell your personal information.
We do not currently use your personal information for targeted advertising or behavioral advertising.
ValueOurKids uses OpenAI’s API for limited features of the site.
When you enter a question into our parenting-guidance search, your question is sent from ValueOurKids’ server to OpenAI to create a mathematical representation, or “embedding,” of the question.
ValueOurKids then compares that representation locally against our own resource library to identify potentially relevant Reflection Summaries, Practical Guides, and What Worked for Parents stories.
Our resource library is not sent to OpenAI each time you perform a search.
Our local search log may record the search question, time of the search, search outcome, relevance score, and information about the resources displayed. The search log does not store your IP address, browser user agent, cookie identifier, account identifier, or session identifier with your search.
Submitting a What Worked for Parents story does not automatically send the story to OpenAI at the time you submit it.
During our review process, an administrator may use an AI-assisted tool to help suggest topics or categories for the story. When this feature is used, relevant story text and the selected child age range may be sent to OpenAI. AI suggestions are reviewed by a person and are not automatically accepted.
If a story is ultimately published, information from the published story may also be processed through OpenAI’s embedding service so that the story can be included in ValueOurKids search results.
We encourage you not to include identifying or highly sensitive personal information in stories or search questions.
OpenAI processes information sent through its API according to its own applicable terms and privacy practices.
Submitting a story does not guarantee publication.
Stories are reviewed before they are published, and publication requires the permission provided with the original submission.
If you later want a published story corrected or removed, please contact us through the ValueOurKids Contact page. We will review the request and, where appropriate, edit, unpublish, or remove the story.
Information that has been removed from the active website may remain temporarily in backups until those backups are replaced or deleted as part of our backup rotation.
Some Reflection Summaries include embedded YouTube videos.
We use YouTube’s privacy-enhanced embedding option for the video player. The video is also lazy-loaded, which means the YouTube player is not loaded when the page first opens.
However, when you scroll far enough for the video player to come into view, your browser begins connecting to YouTube services even if you have not yet pressed Play. These connections may include youtube.com resources used by YouTube’s player software and the privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com video player.
When these connections occur, your browser may send ordinary technical information associated with loading embedded content, such as your IP address, browser information, referring page, and information identifying the requested video.
If you interact with or play an embedded YouTube video, additional processing may occur within YouTube’s embedded player. That processing is controlled by YouTube/Google and is subject to their applicable privacy practices.
ValueOurKids does not currently use cookies for analytics, advertising, behavioral profiling, or cross-site tracking.
During our most recent review of the site, ordinary anonymous browsing did not set first-party cookies. WordPress uses limited browser session storage for a technical browser-feature check related to emoji rendering; this is not used to identify or track visitors.
Embedded third-party content, such as YouTube videos, may operate under the third party’s own technologies and privacy practices once that content loads or you interact with it.
If we introduce analytics, advertising, newsletter services, or other technologies that materially change these practices, we will update this Privacy Policy as appropriate.
Some browsers offer a “Do Not Track” or similar privacy signal.
ValueOurKids does not currently use advertising networks or cross-site behavioral tracking, so we do not alter the site’s behavior in response to traditional Do Not Track browser signals.
Third-party embedded content may collect information when it loads or when you interact with it. At present, the primary visitor-facing third-party embedded service is YouTube, as described above.
ValueOurKids does not currently permit third-party advertising networks or analytics providers to collect information about your activities across ValueOurKids for behavioral advertising.
We use a limited number of service providers to operate ValueOurKids.
These may include:
Website hosting. Our hosting provider processes ordinary technical information necessary to deliver, maintain, secure, and troubleshoot the website.
OpenAI. We use OpenAI’s API for the parenting-guidance search and limited AI-assisted processing of What Worked for Parents content, as described above.
YouTube/Google. YouTube provides embedded videos appearing in some Reflection Summaries. Connections to YouTube begin when an embedded player comes into view.
Email services. When you use our Contact form, the information in your message may be transmitted through the email systems used to deliver the message to ValueOurKids.
We may also disclose information when reasonably necessary to comply with law, legal process, or a valid governmental request; protect the rights, safety, or security of ValueOurKids or others; investigate misuse; or protect the integrity of the website.
We do not sell personal information to these providers.
ValueOurKids does not currently operate a public email-newsletter subscription service.
If we introduce an email newsletter in the future, we will provide appropriate information at the time of signup and update this Privacy Policy to describe the email provider and relevant data practices before activating that service.
We retain information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, including operating the website, responding to requests, maintaining appropriate records, resolving problems, and meeting legal or security requirements.
Retention depends on the type of information.
Contact and What Worked for Parents submissions are maintained as needed for communication, review, moderation, publication, and administration and may be manually deleted when no longer needed.
Published What Worked for Parents stories may remain available until they are removed or unpublished.
Parenting-guidance search logs are automatically limited by both time and capacity. Search-log records older than approximately 12 months are deleted, and the log is also limited to a maximum number of records.
We maintain website backups for security, recovery, and continuity purposes. Information deleted from the active site may remain in a backup for a limited period until that backup is replaced or deleted through our backup-rotation practices.
You may contact us if you:
Please use the Contact page to make your request.
We may need enough information to identify the relevant record and reasonably verify that the request relates to you before making a correction or deletion.
Some information may remain temporarily in backups or may need to be retained when reasonably necessary for security, legal, fraud-prevention, or recordkeeping purposes.
ValueOurKids is designed for parents and caregivers. It is not intended as an online service for children under 13, and we do not provide public child accounts or child-directed submission forms.
We do not ask parents to provide their child’s name. Parents and caregivers may nevertheless choose to discuss their children or family circumstances when submitting a What Worked for Parents story, sending us a message, or asking a parenting question.
We encourage parents and caregivers not to provide identifying or unnecessarily sensitive information about their children.
We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13. If you believe that a child under 13 has submitted personal information directly to ValueOurKids, please contact us so that we can review the situation and take appropriate action, including deletion where appropriate.
We use reasonable administrative and technical measures designed to protect information handled by ValueOurKids from unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or loss.
These measures include limiting access to administrative functions, protecting credentials, and restricting unauthorized access to website backups.
No website, transmission method, or storage system can guarantee absolute security, however.
ValueOurKids may link to websites, videos, resources, or services operated by others.
When you leave ValueOurKids or interact with a third-party service, that service’s privacy practices apply. We encourage you to review the privacy information provided by those services.
We may update this Privacy Policy as ValueOurKids develops, our practices change, or applicable requirements change.
When we make changes, we will update the effective date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects how we collect, use, or share personal information, we will provide additional notice when appropriate.
We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically.
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, want to request a correction or deletion, or have another privacy-related concern, please contact ValueOurKids through our Contact page.
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