Kidpower believes that the best teachable moment is the earliest teachable moment. Even before children can talk or walk, babies learn from their adults what it means to be safe, respected, nurtured, and valued.
Kidpower Colorado offers our Starting Strong Workshop to introduce People Safety skills for young children ages 4 -6 and their parents/caregivers.
Our job as adults is to provide comfort, love, guidance, and protection – and, to remember that babies are also aware of how we speak and act. When we speak and act in safe and respectful ways, babies are learning lessons about safety and respect!
As young children start to develop more mobility, understanding, and language, our job is also to start teaching them how to be safe in their world and with other people.
How do we teach kids to be safe?
Because most young children tend to be very literal, Kidpower teaches about safety with people in simple, clear ways with specific examples from their daily lives. We keep in mind Kidpower’s Seven Keys to Teaching Safety:
- Stay calm – because it’s easier to teach and learn when everyone is calm
- Make it fun – because people learn better when they are having fun
- Make it simple – because simple things are easier to remember
- Be consistent – because consistent messages make more sense
- Practice – a lot! – because repeated, successful practice makes skills stronger and increases confidence
- Make it relevant – because people learn a skill faster when it seems useful
- Stay in charge – because leaders are responsible for the safety of those in their care
In an upbeat, vivid way, we use puppets and social stories to demonstrate the safety rules and skills.
Children learn more from what they see adults do than from what we tell them to do, so we support adults in being excellent role models about making safe choices.
For additional resources on early childhood safety, visit our extensive library of articles on our Kidpower International website.
Things to consider for child safety
Boundary skills – including consent and body autonomy – are powerful tools for building stronger, happier relationships at every age. By making boundary skills part of your daily life with kids from birth, you are giving them tools for a lifetime of stronger, happier relationships!
Boundary skills also happen to be the most powerful skills we know of to keep kids safe from abuse – including sexual abuse.
The good news is that when adults make boundary skills part of daily life with young children to support fun, connection, and communication, they are also helping kids build skills that can help them be safe from abuse – without giving them scary information about abuse.
If you take care of a young child, then your everyday life is full of great opportunities to teach and use boundary skills in order to make your time together more fun – for them as well as for you.
We are experts at helping adults see those opportunities and turn them into fun, positive, teachable moments. When adults use Kipower boundary skills and principles every day to…
- resolve conflict
- make agreements
- address misunderstandings
- improve sibling communication
- address hurtful behavior calmly and confidently
- make tickling, roughhousing, and other games safer and more fun
…then, kids get a lot of practice with the boundary, consent, and body autonomy skills that can help them have more fun and fewer problems with people throughout their lives.
Worrying about leaving babies and young children with other people is normal. And, worrying does not keep kids safe! Learning what to watch out for and how to step in when you have a concern will help you feel more confident and will help them be safe.
The good news is that dangers from caregivers can almost always be prevented. Letting someone else take care of the children we love means trusting this person with the most precious part of our lives. Parents and guardians are responsible for selecting and supervising the care of their children, whether the caregivers are individuals or the staff of programs like child care centers and schools.
At the same time, it is important to keep your balance. You do not want to overreact to an upsetting possibility in a way that damages your child’s trust in being left with other people.
Our article Choosing Safe People to Care for Your Children gives information you can use right away as you are considering leaving your child in someone else’s care.
Even when someone has provided care for your child for a long time, is someone you trust, or is a member of your family, it is still important to respond to ‘red flag’ behaviors in order to keep your child safe. Here are 5 examples:
- Anyone who disregards your safety rules or tries to make you feel wrong for having concerns.
- Any adult who wants to be your child’s friend but not your friend.
- A situation that seems too good to be true – because it often is.
- Someone who continually asks that you trust them.
- Someone who makes unsolicited promises.
This list is also in our bestselling book Doing Right By Our Kids: Protecting Child Safety at All Levels – which includes many more strategies for protecting children from harm. The articles below are from our free Resource library – use them now to learn strategies you can use right away.
In addition, communicating with caregivers is almost always adult-to-adult communication. Building your own adult-level boundary and advocacy skills will prepare you to approach difficult conversations – including with family members, teachers, day care providers, others caring for your child – with confidence. See our Relationship Skills and Fullpower Adult Safety resources for strategies you can learn and use to communicate effectively with people who might care for your child.
At Kidpower, we believe that most people are good. Unfortunately, a few people do very destructive things, which can have a huge impact on everyone’s safety.
The reality is that anyone can be a potential danger to a child. Statistically, children are far more likely to be harmed by someone they know than by a stranger, which is why teaching about boundaries is so important. However, in even the safest of places, there is always a risk that children might be traumatized by getting lost or by having an adult do something dangerous, which is why children need safety plans to follow.
There is no substitute for supervising the people who are caring for your children. No matter where your children are, it is important to make sure that the people responsible for their well-being are ensuring a safe, respectful, caring environment where the adults are paying close attention and fully in charge.
What you can do to prepare your children to learn to protect their own well-being is to give them a strong foundation of the “People Safety” skills that Kidpower teaches. Most problems can be prevented if children and their adults have practiced how to
- ask for help
- set boundaries
- protect their feelings
- stay in charge of their bodies
- know the Safety Plan if they get lost
- follow your Stranger Safety rules
- check first with their grownups before they change their plan about where they are going, what they are doing, and who they are with.
It’s not enough just to tell children what to do; they also need to practice. Until children have the skill, the life experience, and the confidence to take charge of their safety on their own – whether that means on their own for a playdate, on their own in a room, on their own in the front yard, or any other example – it’s the job of adults to stay aware, together, and in charge of the child’s safety.
On a day-to-day level, children are most likely to deal with social problems such as getting their feelings hurt because they are being left out or someone says something unkind; reacting either too passively or too aggressively when they get frustrated; getting caught up in doing something potentially dangerous together; and not knowing how to persist in getting help from busy adults.
The truth is, no matter how old we are, most of the time the people who do things that bother us, irritate us, or make us feel upset are actually people we know and love!
Boundary skills are powerful tools for safe, strong relationships. Adults can use and model boundary skills from the moment a child is born to keep them safe and ensure that others are following your boundaries about what is and is not okay around your child.
To protect your child and support safe, strong relationships, you might choose to set boundaries with friends and family about specific behaviors around your child including:
- physical behaviors – like roughhousing, tickling, or hugging
- verbal behaviors – like joking, teasing, or talking about scary things
- habits – like substance use, speeding, or playing upsetting news stories kids can overhear
Of course, your friends and family get to set their boundaries, too. Sometimes, you may need to use your power to create physical and emotional distance in order to keep your young child safe if others are behaving in ways that put your child’s health, safety, or well-being at risk.
Kidpower’s Founding Principle is that the safety and well-being of a child are more important than anyone’s embarrassment, inconvenience, or offense. Keeping this in mind can help you make difficult decisions – and keep meaningful relationships safe and strong.
As your child grows, you will continue to give this protection and also guide them to set and respect boundaries. This will help them have stronger relationships with friends, family members, teachers, and others. Teaching children how to express and withdraw consent is part of boundary setting for all kinds of touch and attention about play, fun and affection – consent is NOT just about sexual behavior.
When adults use and teach boundary and consent rules throughout a child’s early years, teaching about consent and sexual behavior when they are older can be much easier because you have already developed a common language and set of skills about setting and respecting boundaries about touch and attention for play, fun, and affection for lots of other types of everyday situations.
So, making boundaries part of daily life as early as possible is one way to empower them with skills for a lifetime of safer, stronger relationships of all kinds!
Babies are born full of power! They have the power to move, to think, to make noise, to be aware, to grab, to bring things to their mouths…. These are a few examples of their inborn “Kidpower”.
And, they have no life experience – they don’t understand how their power could help or harm themselves or others.
It’s the job of young children to experiment with their power – and the job of adults to guide them and to keep everyone safe while they are learning.
Examples of young children experimenting with their power include wandering away, biting, screaming, throwing things, excluding, and using hurtful words.
Kidpower strategies equip adults to respond confidently with kindness, caring, compassion, and skill – to stop hurtful behaviors, to help kids make amends, and to help everyone practice safer ways to use their power.
Until children have the skills and the life experience they need to take charge of their safety independently, they need caring adults aware of what they are doing, where they are going, and who they are with in order to help them be safe from harm – in person and, when they are older, online.
At the same time, adults are the ones responsible for helping children build those skills for independence by gradually giving them more opportunities to make choices. This is true even for very young children as they begin to express their preferences for things, foods, clothes, toys, activities, and personal space.
The job of staying close while also giving space can be challenging. Many adults say that the moment they find a balance, their child grows and changes again – and so they have to find a new balance!
We are experts at equipping adults with tools to navigate this journey so they feel more prepared and more confident to protect children while also helping them develop age-appropriate skills for growing independence.
We are experts at preparing adults with the tools and information they need to use Kidpower skills, strategies, and methodology in their personal and professional lives with kids to:
- protect children from abuse, kidnapping, and other harm
- introduce and talk about safety without being scary
- teach ‘people safety’ as confidently as they teach manners, hygiene, and car safety
To protect children from birth, we offer adults-only workshops, online resources, and books for:
- parents, guardians, and other caregivers
- early childhood educators and childcare providers
- Health care, social service, and recreation program professionals serving young kids and families
To protect and empower children ages 3-7, we also offer:
- Familypower workshops for kids together with their parents/guardians
- Starting Strong workshops for groups of kids together with their teachers, care providers, coaches, or other youth group leaders
Use our resources now to keep your kids safe – and contact us with questions, requests, and workshop inquiries.
Kidpower’s core social emotional skills for being safe with people – like the core skills of hygiene and car safety – are the same at all ages. They include how to:
- Act aware, calm, and confident
- Protect yourself emotionally from hurtful words or behavior
- Manage emotional triggers to stay in charge of what you say and do
- Recognize what is and is not safe
- Move away from trouble physically, emotionally, and digitally
- Assess – and think first or check first before acting
- Set powerful and respectful boundaries
- Apply safety principles about touch and attention in healthy relationships
- Advocate assertively and persistently for help with safety problems
- Use your voice and body to stop an attack and get to safety
We teach adults how to introduce these skills from birth – just like they start introducing hygiene, car safety, and manners from birth!
And – just like the hygiene and car safety skills adults model with babies are the same skills those babies will use their whole lives to be safe – the Kidpower core social-emotional skills adults can begin modeling for babies are the same skills that will help them be safe with people, in person and online, as teens and adults.
In infancy, children begin learning these skills entirely through adult modeling – in the same way they start learning from adult modeling of hygiene and car safety habits like handwashing and looking both ways before crossing.
As children develop language, adults can teach Kidpower core skills with stories, puppets, songs, art, and games – in addition to modeling the core skills by using them all the time.