Children are naturally energetic, and during their spontaneous activities, they often encounter potentially dangerous situations, especially when lacking parental supervision. Identifying actions that pose risks plays a crucial role in ensuring their safety. This paper build a novel challenging dataset, namely KidRisk, including 2,500 short videos of children’s actions and 10,000 images for dangerous action of children. We also introduce a benchmark on our newly constructs dataset and find that traditional deep learning models demonstrated limited effectiveness on these tasks. Therefore, we develop vision-language based baselines with exceptional context understanding of visual information. Our proposed methods achieved an accuracy of 83.53% in classifying children’s actions and 96.14% in recognizing children’s dangerous actions, significantly outperforming traditional approaches. These results confirm that vision-language models are not only feasible but also highly effective in detecting hazardous actions, contributing positively to safeguarding children’s safety.