Stranger danger

not sure why but this has been on my mind lately - at what age and how did you teach your child about strangers

how not to go with anyone other than family and use a secret password or something like that, etc

how if anyone (god forbid) hurts them, that they need to tell us

Re: Stranger danger

bumo for the night crowd....I KNOW someone has some advice for me

Re: Stranger danger

First, I tried to teach my son the difference between a friend and stranger. Sometimes it is hard to tell. The friendly guy who walks his dogs by our house everyday is not a friend even though we say hi and someti,es pet his dogs. After we meet new people we sometimes play the friend/stranger game.

Then I talked about relevant things as they came up. He is five now and by now I think he knows a lot but I never just think he is totally safe. Some of our rules are:

Only talk to stranger when Mommy is there.

Never go near our fence when a stranger is by the fence.

Never accept candy from someone. '

Never help an adult unless mommy or adult in charge tells you to. We have discussed examples such as looking for a dog.

Never go in the car with anyone except our two neighbors and family.

People who look nice and offer us good things may not be nice.

Whenever we go to an amusement park we pick a meet up place and point out who works there and who could help. But we have a rule to never go to a private place with a stranger, even a police officer. Always stay in same location until mommy and daddy find you. Never go inside an empty place or car.

We have never lost our children in a public place but you never know and I figure as they get older they will have a real sense of what is safe and what is dangerous.

We do not talk about these things all the time, nor do we talk about everything at once, but as they come up I try to teach him about safety. I try to teach him that most people are nice. I do not want to scare the crap out of him so its a fine line. I started teaching him around 3 or 4.

The other day he told on his daddy for something ridiculous and I started to say that daddy is a grown up and you can't tell on grownups. Suddenly I realized that that was not a good idea to teach him because of course he should feel like he can tell on an adult if they really did something wrong.

Message edited 5/25/2009 8:16:19 PM.