Dear Trusted Adults,
My name is Amy, and I am the founder of Trust Buddy.
I want to share the deeply personal reason why I created this app. For a long time, I carried traumatic memories from my childhood, including physical abuse, assaults, and a kidnapping. At the time, my young brain did what it had to do to survive: it blocked the trauma out. I minimized those experiences as just "weird" things that happened with "weird" men, and I just kept going. Because I kept those secrets locked away, I didn't begin to truly process the damage until I was much older.
Everything changed when I had my daughter.
Looking at her, I began to see my past through a completely different lens. I realized the common thread in everything I had survived: I had never told anyone.
When I was growing up, these conversations were incredibly hard to have face-to-face, so they simply never happened. But the world has changed. Today, kids communicate differently, they live and connect in digital spaces. Instead of fighting that, we can use it to our advantage. This app meets children on their own terms, in a medium where they already feel comfortable, giving them a gentler way to open up about things that might feel too heavy or scary to say out loud.
We can protect our children by starting these age-appropriate conversations early. Simply by joining a "Trusted Circle" with your child on this app, you are sending them a powerful message: I know these things can happen, and you can always talk to me about them.
My hope is that Trust Buddy equips you with the right information and gives your child a safe, familiar way to reach out. Together, we can make it exponentially harder for anyone to prey on our children, get kids talking, and build a safer world for them.