Healthy Relationships 

Healthy relationships bring happiness, reduce stress and create opportunities for support and resilience in facing other life challenges. Kids need healthy relationships with their friends, their families, their teachers and other adult role models. As they get older, this early relationship modeling will guide them in navigating healthy dating and intimate relationships.

The Ohio Department of Health Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Prevention Program funds local organizations that offer programs on healthy relationship education. Please e-mail: HealthyO@odh.ohio.gov with the subject line: ATT: SADVPP - Healthy Relationships for information about these projects.

Some great resources about healthy relationships for youth include:

Futures Without Violence - Start Strong: Building Healthy Teen Relationships (Start Strong) is the largest initiative ever funded to target 11- to- 14-year-olds and rally entire communities to promote healthy relationships as the way to prevent teen dating violence and abuse.

That's Not Cool is a national public education campaign that uses digital examples of controlling, pressuring and threatening behavior to raise awareness about and prevent teen dating abuse. That's Not Cool is sponsored and co-created by Futures Without Violence (formerly Family Violence Prevention Fund), the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women and the Advertising Council.

The thinkb4youspeak campaign aims to raise awareness about the prevalence and consequences of anti-LGBT bias and behavior in America’s schools. The ultimate goal is to reduce and prevent the use of homophobic language in an effort to create a more positive environment for LGBT teens. The campaign also aims to reach adults, including school personnel and parents. Their support of this message is crucial to its success.

Liz Claiborne Inc.’s Love Is Not Abuse initiatives strive to address partner abuse at its root cause; therefore, the company has begun a sustained effort to focus on teen dating abuse and violence. With a teen dating abuse prevention curriculum, hand books and innovative research to help teens, teachers, parents, and domestic violence organizations, Liz Claiborne Inc. provides free resources to all members of society.

Throughout the Start Strong web site, parents find information and tools to help you talk to your kids about healthy relationships.  There are many resources for adults on how to teach kids about respect and how to stay safe, as well as training for teachers on teen relationship violence prevention and guidance for schools and other community organizations with creating programs and policies to promote healthy relationships among young people. 

Last Reviewed 4/10/12