Personal safety conversations with children

Talking to your child about personal safety can start at a young age. Personal safety and protective behaviours should be a topic for ongoing conversations parents have with their children. Having open and honest dialogue with your child about personal safety helps them to understand the importance of the topic and to develop comfort in coming to you to share information and ask questions as they grow and develop over time. 

Teaching children about personal safety:

-           Builds on their knowledge and awareness of safety

-           Builds confidence, trust and resilience

-           Helps them to learn about their rights

-           Empowers them to have a voice and participate in decision making.

-           Provides them with guidance on responding to unsafe situations.

-           Encourages them to speak up and act to protect their safety and the safety of others

Here are some tips for having personal safety conversations with your child:

1.       Start simple: talk about basic safety and gain an understanding of your child’s knowledge and awareness. Help them to explore and identify basic feelings and emotions. Ask simple age appropriate questions.

2.       Language and terminology: teach your child the correct words to identify their body parts. Reinforce that their private body parts belong to them.

3.       Safety scenarios: Explore a range of scenarios that you feel your child might encounter and discuss or role play how to respond in these scenarios. This can also involve guiding children on what to say.

4.       Unsafe feelings: Guide children to identify unsafe feelings and emotions. This can be things like feeling scared and nervous, feeling unsure and confused. It can also involve talking about feelings in our body, if something hurts, quickened heartbeat, a nervous stomach feeling.

5.       Identify safe people: have ongoing conversation about safe people in your child’s community and who they can turn to if they need help or to talk.

6.       Secrets and truth: engage in conversations about keeping secrets. If any secret feels wrong, can be harmful, makes you feel scared, its important to tell one of your safe people. Exploring the concept of telling the truth and what that means goes hand in hand with the concept of secrets.

Speaking regularly to children about their safety is a powerful way to build their confidence and empower them to develop safe boundaries and ongoing protective behaviours throughout their lives.