We all want our children to understand stranger danger. We want to teach them the skills to walk home from school, stay home alone and even go to a public place by themselves, when the time is right. We want to know our children will know what to do and how to stay safe when they are out in the world on their own.
In our Stranger Danger; Internet Safety & Bullying 101 classes we teach our participants to recognize what a stranger is, how it may be somebody that you don’t know at all, or somebody they don’t know very well. That a stranger can be a man, or a woman, or a teenager. A stranger can be any height, any size, any age.
But, what is a safe stranger? This may be confusing to teach a child what a safe stranger is, but it is important to do.
A good place to find a Safe Stranger is in a safe place. The best type of safe place is always in a busy public area. A safe stranger is someone that your child doesn’t know very well or have never met before, that can be trusted to help them.
For example, we don’t know all of the Firefighters or Police Officers that come to our aid but we can think of them as Safe Strangers. Safe Strangers are people who can be trusted to help us in a public place when they are at work and doing their job. For instance, if a child is attending a Seconds Save Lives course at one of our venues, let’s say in Vaughan, at The Sports Village. This is a huge place. There may not be a firefighter there, or a police officer, but there are office staff and arena staff. So if there was ever a problem, they could go to one of these staff members and recognize that these are safe strangers. Another example may be that a child goes to one of our courses at a different type of venue like the McCowan Market Loblaws in Markham. The safe strangers in this location will be the cashiers, the managers and the general workers. At the courses that they attend, our instructors will also help them, we are safe strangers. Get it?
I hope that this helps you to teach your children. I know our society is a little different then it was when I was growing up and we don’t exactly have block parents anymore, so we need to move with the times and understand who we can and cannot trust in order to keep our children as safe as possible.
Be safe everyone.
Seconds Save Lives First Aid & Safety Team
