As a mother, one thing you want more than anything else for your child is their safety. You want them to be able to grow up and maneuver through life and all the little trials and tribulations with as few bumps and bruises as possible.
There are many different safety tips that you can use with your children and they all typically fall within these major scenarios:
- Home Safety
- Stranger Danger
- In Case of Emergency
In this article, we’re going to talk about each of these scenarios and discuss some tips and advice you can use to help your child navigate through these situations.
Home Safety
What better place is there to start?
All good parents strive to make the home as safe as possible for their children. From the earlier years of baby proofing to the time spent schooling your children on some of the more complex basics – don’t eat this, don’t touch that.
As far as baby proofing goes, you want to make sure to move any furniture with hard corners (perhaps, a glass coffee table) and pick up anything small or sharp that could harm the child. You should also take care and place anything bad for the baby out of reach – just remember that the bigger they get, the more reach they’ll have.
It’s very important that you secure the cleaning supplies and plastic trash bags. Children who are too young to understand the danger can get sick ingesting cleaning chemicals and the bags present a choking hazard. Either find a new location for these things or invest in some security measures to lock those cabinets and drawers.
And, on the topic of home safety, it might be wise to invest in a home security system if you haven’t already. Obviously, no parent wants to imagine the unfortunate event of a home invasion, but it pays to be prepared and sites like www.homessecurity.com/ are a great place to start looking if you’re in the market.
Stranger Danger
Most schools do a pretty decent job of covering this but it’s important to speak with your kids, when they are old enough, about stranger danger. There are the basics like “don’t speak to strangers” but there are other things less cut and dry.
Let’s say, for example, your child has a friend and this friend is going to the store with their uncle and they have invited your child. Well, obviously, the uncle is no stranger to your child’s friend, but you and your child certainly don’t know them. What would your child do in that scenario? Would they even know how to act?
If you spend some time explaining to your child how they should act in the presence of a stranger – no talking, no taking gifts, no accepting rides, yelling “fire” instead of simply screaming during a confrontation – you’ll be helping to give them the tools necessary to act in a difficult scenario.
And, while you can’t prepare for every eventuality like this, you can lay down the basic groundwork by explaining to your child the importance of not associating with strangers. For anything that’s a little more dubious like the aforementioned scenario, you could stress the importance of your child asking permission before acting. There are quite a few phone service providers that let you set up an account for kids. That would give your child a way to keep in touch if something came up and they weren’t sure how to act.
In Case of Emergency
Kids have fire drills in school and there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do the same thing at home – and not just for fire drills. It’s very important that your child knows how to act in case of emergency and this CAN be done without traumatizing them.
In the event of a fire, you want to designate a waypoint or a meeting place where the entire family can assemble. Work out a route with your child so they understand how best to accomplish getting from point A to B and, that way, you won’t have to worry about them panicking.
What if it wasn’t a fire though? What if the emergency was the home invasion mentioned earlier?
Situations like home invasion are a little tougher. One bit of advice that works wonders is to coordinate with the neighbors. If you are on particularly good terms with the people that live next door, see if they will let you designate their home as a sort of safe house for your kid. That way your child can escape to the neighbor’s where they can safely wait and call the police.
And, of course, don’t be afraid to consult your local law enforcement agency for more safety tips about the home and strangers. You might even be able to arrange to have an officer speak with you and your child. If anyone will have more ideas about keeping your kids safe, they will.
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