Introduction to Personal Safety - Why It’s Important for Girls
Personal safety is all about knowing how to protect oneself and make safe choices in everyday life. As a girl gets older, she may find herself in new environments and situations that challenge her to stay aware and make quick decisions. Understanding personal safety means learning to recognize potential risks, building confidence, and taking charge of her own well-being.
Safety Awareness Basics
In our women self-defense programs, Girls’ Street Smarts and Campus SafeWalk, we focus on preparing girls with the mental and physical tools they need to navigate the challenges of personal safety.
Safety Awareness Basics include situational awareness, confidence-building, boundary setting, and self-defense tactics, alongside broader themes of mental well-being and resilience. This series of blog posts are designed to cover a comprehensive range of safety and personal growth topics for children, pre-teen and teen girls.
Why is Personal Safety Important?
A solid foundation in personal safety is the cornerstone of building confidence, independence, and resilience.
Since toddlerhood, parents have taught what is safe and what is unsafe. Experience has taught that fire is too hot to touch, looking forward keeps you from running into doorways, that older kids don’t care about your safety on the playground, open water is not a thing to trifle with, and that some people are definitely unsafe.
You’ve learned to take practical steps to stay physically, mentally, and emotionally safe in various situations, from school to public spaces. Practicing safety isn’t about being afraid. It’s about feeling empowered and prepared. By following certain guidelines and putting them into practice in your everyday life, you can feel more confidence and secure.
Simple tips to keep in mind such as:
Keeping your phone charged
Memorizing at least one to two phone numbers of people to contact in an emergency.
Informing someone of your plans, where you are going, who you are meeting, what time you will be back.
Being aware of your surroundings, check the cars parked nearby, notice what people are hanging around at the park or parking lots.
Walk with purpose, eyes focused, make eye contact as though you were creating a memory of a person’s face and clothing. Scrutinize everything. Convey strength in purpose and action. Predators won’t perceive you as a victim and move on to less disciplined targets.
At Ambrose Academy, we developed a curriculum that helps young children understand why personal safety is important. The Safety First mentality means the fun keeps going, the environment stays positive, no one gets hurt, everyone watches out for each other, building trust in the community within our school as a safe and fun place to be.
Mental Self-Defense Training
As children become pre-teens and teens, parents can expand safety skills with mental self-defense training.
When that young person begins to venture beyond the safety of their home and community, then new personal safety skills need to be learned and practiced to keep that child physically, mentally, and emotionally safe.
Learning that independence and autonomy means it’s okay to say “no” to any given situation is another aspect of personal safety. The strength to stand your ground, voice your expectations and boundaries has to be practiced regularly.
How to react to or counter pushback, negativity, or hurt feelings are part of communication skills that involve role-play, discussion, and getting comfortable with “educating” those that interact with us. Getting comfortable with expressing our needs and boundaries is part of resilience training.
For young people and specifically young girls, this training of confidence, independence, and resiliency is essential to building trust at a young age. Trust in oneself, trust in others that love them, and trust in their enviroment.
Personal safety in the early years are a given and most children are unaware the lengths their families go to keep them safe. Parents, grandparents, teachers all on the alert, taking their caregiver duties seriously, offering children an environment they can trust and feel safe.
How can we prepare her for the challenges that she will face in a world beyond her control? Early mental self-defense training allows her to gain experience in a safe and nurturing environment. In our program, Girls Street Smarts Safety and Self Defense, we frame personal safety as a health and wellness issue.
As a girl gets older, there’s more at stake. Unsafe behavior at this age can mean life changing physical and mental consequences. The world is changing in challenging ways, and we need to give our children the tools and guidance to meet those challenges.
It’s time to become proactive and train for safety as though it was like any other drill or physical exercise at our school. A family’s safety management plan should include this type of training.
Girls’ Street Smarts Safety and Self-Defense Program
As a children's martial arts instructor and life skills coach for over twenty-five years, this is what I have learned about safety. Raising safety conscious children means making safety a high value goal.
Kids need to demonstrate basic safety skills, showing they care and value their own security and well-being. It's time for them to take safety awareness and street safety seriously. A pre-teen or teen’s goal is to prove that you can trust her to follow safety rules. When she comes in on time for curfew or leaves a party because she feels unsafe, it shows that she is serious about personal safety and security.
Safety means recognizing the “red flags” that clue her in on potentially dangerous ploys and risky situations and staying away from them. With education, mental coping skills, role-play, learning to deal with negative peer pressure, and developing her own code of conduct, the tools offered in this program can help her make the right decisions about her personal safety when you are not around.
Girls’ Street Smarts Program is a comprehensive and safety awareness program with practical training in mental self-defense and physical self-defense. It’s a proactive approach to personal security. She will learn to recognize and decide what relationships bring positivity, support and enrich her life and to leave behind those that undermine her confidence, that are abusive, and drains her energy and feeling of well-being.
Foster Safety Consciousness
DAILY SAFETY RULES
Create daily safety rules, rituals or actions that help you keep safe.
Young children already understand that safety is important to their parents and caregivers. Lessons and rules are enforced and repeated so often, that children know what they can and cannot do. They can see the worry on their parents’ faces and hear it in their voices. Instructions on fire safety, water safety, bike safety, car safety are always part of the parental safety management plan.
Teens may see your constant reminders as nagging, reactionary, or over-protective. Before your child becomes a raging hormonal teen bent on self-determination and expression, and no longer sees you as relevant source of information, be proactive and teach your young girls and pre-teens the value your family places on personal safety.
Personal Safety Training offers valuable tools and are a prerequisite to gaining privileges and building trust. Most of the tools are focused on safety awareness and recognizing risk and implementing preventative measures. From one perspective, it is a crime prevention tool. Mental Self-Defense means a proactive approach to building confidence, independence and resilience.
Start early having nurturing, non-judgmental conversations with children about safety and important teen issues. Plant the seed of safety consciousness and she will reap the benefits for years to come.
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Interested in our next program? Contact Us and we will send you a flyer for you to share.
What’s Next: Three blog posts are about Situational Awareness.
Part One: Big Picture Thinking: How to Teach Situational Awareness to Toddlers and Preschoolers.
Part Two: Raising a Safety Conscious Child: Situational Awareness for Ages 5-8
Part Three: Strong, Smart, and Safe: Teaching Teen Girls the Power of Situational Awareness
Order the comprehensive ebooks today! Learn More
The Big Picture: A Parent’s Guide to Teaching Situational
Awareness to Children of All Ages
Other parental guide ebooks:
Five Easy Steps to Teaching the Concept of Consent to Children
