Program Highlights:
- Classroom lessons: engaging discussions and activities led by teachers that are curriculum-aligned in all Canadian jurisdictions
- Take-home activities: to reinforce safety messages from the lessons and enhance communication between parents and children
- Additional parent resources: practical tools and guidance to help parents continue the conversation at home and support children in building lifelong safety
The Kids in the Know Program is used in schools across Canada to help children build personal safety skills—both online and offline—while also supporting the adults around them, including parents, caregivers, and educators, in having empowering and ongoing conversations about personal safety.
What Your Child Will Learn
Through age-appropriate lessons from kindergarten to high school, children learn safety skills that build confidence and competence, helping them recognize, avoid, and respond to unsafe situations both online and offline.
- Trusting their instincts: Children are taught to listen to their body—knowing when something doesn’t feel right and seeking help. Teaching self-awareness from an early age helps children recognize and avoid unsafe situations.
- Identifying safe adults: Children are encouraged to identify safe adults in their lives and practice when and how to ask for help. When children know who the safe adults are in their lives, they build a reliable support system that fosters a sense of security and safety.
- Understanding boundaries: Children learn what personal boundaries are—with respect to their body, personal space, and relationships—and how to recognize and establish safe limits.
- Assertiveness skills: Children practice refusal skills, learning how to remove themselves from uncomfortable situations and how to tell a safe adult. These skills build self-protection, self-confidence and teach them about their rights—body ownership, setting boundaries, and speaking-up, even to someone older, in a position of authority, and in peer relationships.
- Healthy/safe friendships and relationships: Children learn how to recognize the difference between safe, respectful relationship behaviours and those that involve control, pressure, or manipulation. This helps them build positive connections and identify harmful behaviours—laying the groundwork for healthy, safe relationships throughout their lives.
- Online Safety: Children learn to think critically about what they see or do online including content exposure to inappropriate or harmful material, contact with adults or peers that may be inappropriate in nature, and conduct that could cause harm to either themselves or another person. This promotes risk avoidance and response, helping children navigate the digital world safely and responsibly.
Staying Informed and Involved
Parents play a key role in their child’s personal safety. When schools and families work together, safety education becomes stronger, more meaningful, and most importantly, more effective.
Learn more:
- Use the program’s take-home resources and website resources to spark conversations, ask questions, and reinforce key lessons.
- Learn more about child sexual abuse and ways to reduce risk.
- Access information about online safety including emerging risks, interests by age, and talking tips.
- Stay informed — sign up for our parent newsletter.
- Check out the FAQ page for more information.