After the severe weather we’ve just had, it’s become even more important to keep Halloween safe. From the Jerry Agar Show, here’s my recommended apps for staying prepared as the kids go trick-or-treating tonight. You can also follow me on Twitter here for more great apps.

FBI Child ID

iPhone/Android

Free

Before you let your kids out into the night, use this app to take a photo of what they’re wearing and record a handy profile of their physical traits and basic information. Should they go missing, you can send this digital package to your local authorities where it will spread throughout their services, making it easier to spot your child during those crucial, early hours of the search. Created by the FBI, the app will also take you through the steps you need to focus on as a parent and give direction during a time when you’re bound to feel quite lost.

Life360 Family Locator

iPhone/Android/BlackBerry

Free

When parents track their children they can run into a number of Big Brother issues. Life360 avoids this by setting it up so that the family as a unit uses GPS to share their location and make sure everyone is okay. There’s a private chat feed just for your family to use in keeping each other abreast and the map includes listings for local emergency services. The basic service is free and covers smartphones, but if you pay the $4.99 monthly fee, it can also be used on regular cellphones too.

Circle of 6

iPhone/Android

Free

Aimed at young women who are socially active and attending Halloween parties and gatherings, Circle of 6 asks you to select six of your most dependable friends as “back-up” to help in social situations that might get out of hand. Designed as a response to sexual violence, the idea is to address situations that do not seem bad enough to call 911, but might become so without prevention. It could be that a hostile ex-boyfriend has shown up at the party or someone who’s had too much to drink keeps giving you unwanted attention, this phone lets you reach out to your six friends on the sly, asking for help with just a few screen taps and a set of pre-written messages.

This can be a request to have one of your six friends call your phone to create an interruption for you and a way to excuse yourself from a situation or you can transmit your GPS location and request that one of your six come directly for help or offer a safe ride home. When one friend answers the request, the others are notified and kept abreast of the changes.

First Aid By American Red Cross

iPhone/Android

Free

This app offers simple step-by-step instructions and video guides for everyday emergencies, from broken bones and burns, to animal bites and poisons, to heart attacks and allergic reactions. Comes packed with tips and preparation guides for hurricanes and tornados plus quizzes to help you learn the needed steps in advance, rather than in the middle of an emergency.

Monster Meter

iPhone

$1.99

After a night of ghouls and ghosts roaming the streets and knocking on your door it can be difficult to fall asleep if you’re young enough to wonder if there might be monsters hiding in your bedroom too. This app will turn your phone into a scanner that you can give to your kids to check their bedrooms for monsters. They hold the phone up and point it around the room and a little meter display flutters as it gets closer to any monsters and sounds an alarm when it finds one.

Parental controls will allow you to decide which approach is best. You can set it to pretend that there are monsters and then use the app to deal with them, or instead set it to pretend that the room is empty, confirming that the monsters where unable to get into the bedroom in the first place, whichever you think will make your little ones sleep more comfortably.