Teaching Your Children About Safety

Community Resource Kit 2003 - Alaska Children's Trust

Know everything you can about your children's activities and friends.  Monitor children's activities and participate with them. Don't allow children to play alone in fields, on playgrounds, or in other dangerous or isolated areas.

Teach your children to refuse anything from strangers, including money, gifts or rides.  Know where new items come from.

Teach your children how to safely enter home alone. Teach them how to pretend you are home and how to answer the phone if they are alone.

Teach your children to keep a safe distance from strangers and not to give someone they don't know directions for help. Adults need to get help from other adults. Do not let your children go to public places, especially rest rooms, alone.

Develop a family plan stressing where to meet if lost, when you are away from home. Do not have children meet you in the parking lot.

Do not place your children's names on their clothing or on the outside of their possessions. This limits strangers addressing them as if they know them.

Teach your children to say NO to "touches" on the part(s) of their bodies covered
by a swimming suit.

Teach your children to say NO, to TELL SOMEONE, and to GET AWAY if someone bothers them.

Teach your children about secrets and that some "secrets" have to be told if children and their parents are to be kept safe.

Join with other concerned parents to set up safety systems for your community.