Good Touch and Bad Touch for Kids

The good touch, bad touch framing is well intentioned and safeguarding specialists have largely moved away from it. It is worth understanding why, because the gaps are not obvious and they are the gaps that matter.

Where it fails

Harmful touch does not always feel bad. This is the central problem. Grooming is frequently gentle and pleasant, and a child taught that bad touch feels bad concludes that what is happening cannot be the thing they were warned about. Worse, they may feel they have done something wrong because it did not feel unpleasant.

Necessary touch can feel bad. Medicine, an injection, having a splinter removed, being cleaned when unwell. A child working from the feeling alone gets these wrong in the other direction.

It puts the judgement on the child. A four-year-old is asked to classify adult behaviour by how it feels, which is a heavy thing to hand them and not something they can reliably do.

What is used instead

Rules about bodies and secrets, which do not depend on a child interpreting a feeling.

Body ownership. Your body is yours. You decide about hugs and kisses. Nobody continues when you say stop.

Private parts. The parts under underwear. Adults do not look at or touch them except for health or hygiene, and they say why when they do.

The secrets rule. Surprises get told in the end and are fun. Secrets you must keep for ever are not allowed here. If any adult asks you to keep one, tell me and you will not be in trouble.

The safe adults list. Three or four people, including one outside the house.

The secrets rule is the most useful of the four, because it targets the mechanism rather than asking a child to assess a feeling.

The uh-oh feeling still has a place

Teaching a child to notice when something feels off, and to act on it without needing to justify it, remains worth doing. What changes is that it sits alongside the rules rather than instead of them, and it is framed as permission rather than as a detection method: if something feels wrong you may leave, say no, or come and tell me, and you do not have to explain why.

The part most likely to matter

Whether your child brings you difficult news at all. That is decided by every earlier occasion when they brought you something small and were met with help rather than anger, panic or a lecture.

If you are worried about a specific child, contact your local child protection service or a specialist helpline. This page is general guidance and is not a safeguarding assessment.