KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia needs stronger support networks to protect children, including trusted adults, safe schools and community-based assistance, as many still lack reliable avenues to seek help before situations escalate, child protection experts said.
They stressed that safeguarding children must extend beyond parental supervision and responses to reported abuse, with equal emphasis on psychological safety, healthy relationships and adults who are willing to listen without judgement.
Play Therapy Malaysia chief executive Madeleine Yong said children should have what she described as a “felt sense of safety”, particularly when experiencing fear, anger, distress or making mistakes.
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“A safe child can make a mess. They can explore. They can be curious. They can go out, run around, be angry and yell, and still know there is a trusted adult who will not go away,” she said during a plenary session at the National Child Protection Leadership Conference 2026 here.
Madeleine said vulnerable children without trusted adults might continue with their daily routines while remaining in a state of heightened alert or survival.
She added that children who had experienced trauma, abuse or institutional care needed more than advice to develop resilience, requiring meaningful connections, emotional support and practical life skills.
“The children who are undocumented, the children who have no education, the children who are sick, the children who are in institutions, who have not been given living skills, when they come out of the institution, they have to live.
“We need to give them those skills for them to be resilient, otherwise they will not be resilient,” she said.
Thrive Well clinical manager and licensed counsellor Yap Hui Ling said resilience was built on safe relationships, particularly for children facing adversity who needed reassurance that support would remain available even when they encountered setbacks.
She said adults often concentrated on teaching children how to solve problems without first ensuring they felt secure enough to attempt them.
“Sometimes it is about taking one step backwards to really build a solid sense of safety, where they feel that even if they make a mistake, or even if things do not work out, someone is there to catch them.
“Someone is there to say, it is okay, let’s try it again, so that the child has more courage to try one more time,” she said.
Makchic senior adviser Najmin Tajudin said parents should not equate keeping children safe with excessive monitoring or restrictions, as young people also needed knowledge, healthy relationships and access to responsible adults.
She said the digital environment had added to the challenges of parenting, with online relationships, cyberbullying and social media pressures extending beyond school hours.
“Cyberbullying is a concern because it no longer stops at the school gate.
“Now, children can be reached late at night, sometimes in front of a large audience. It is not just their school friends anymore,” she said.
Earlier, Children’s Protection Society Malaysia president Datuk Seri Nazir Ariff said child protection should not be treated as a temporary priority that attracted attention only after cases of abuse or deaths.
“Child protection cannot only be about responding to harm. It must also be about preventing harm before it happens,” he said.
The two-day conference, organised by the Kuala Lumpur branch of Children’s Protection Society Malaysia in partnership with the Women Economic Forum and G100 Global Meet 2026, is being held under the theme “The Best Interests of the Child”.
A policy lab scheduled for tomorrow will review Malaysia’s child protection system, identify gaps in implementation and develop recommendations to inform future policy and advocacy efforts.