Safety Tips for Parents

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 about strangers.
• 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 strangers directions for help. Adults need to get help from other adults.
• Use secret codes with your children for use when they need to positively identify each other or ask for help.
• 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.
• Teach your children to say "no" to touches on the parts 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.
• Join with other concerned parents to set up safety systems for your neighborhood.
• Teach your children which kinds of secrets are harmless and which ones are not. Assure them that some "secrets" have to be told if children and their parents are to be kept safe.