Parents teaching young children home safety rules: Implications for childhood injury risk

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2014.02.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Results revealed more rules for children in the older age group than the younger age group.

  • Parents taught the actual rule more than the basis for the rule in the younger age group.

  • About half the rules restricted the child from doing the risk behavior completely.

  • The remaining rules allowed for the risk behavior under certain circumstances.

  • Implications of these findings for children's risk of injury are discussed.

Abstract

Teaching safety rules is a common practice but little is known about this. Fifty-eight parents of children 2 to 2.5 or 3 to 3.5 years of age reported on the safety rules they have, the factors that prompted these rules, the strategies used to teach these rules, and how they react to noncompliance with these rules. Results revealed more safety rules for children in the older group than the younger group, and greater emphasis on teaching the rule than teaching the basis for the rule at younger than older ages. Only about half the rules restricted the child from doing the risk behavior completely, whereas the remaining rules allowed for the behavior under certain circumstances. Parents assumed safety rules would prevent injuries and mostly implemented rules in reaction to evidence of injury risk. Parents equated noncompliance with not understanding, assuming that if children understood they would comply. Implications for childhood injury risk are discussed.

Section snippets

Managing injury risk in the home

Most parents report being concerned about young children's safety and that they take precautions to prevent home injuries (Gärling and Gärling, 1993, Gärling and Gärling, 1995, Morrongiello and Dayler, 1996, Peterson et al., 1993). Examining the nature of these precautions has revealed that caregivers use three strategies to manage injury risk for young children in the home: supervision (i.e., attention and proximity), implementation of environmental changes to prevent access to hazards (e.g.,

Participants

A power analysis was conducted to estimate the sample size needed for identifying significant effects related to teaching. As recommended (Cohen, 1992), effect size was estimated based on findings from past related research (e.g., Morrongiello et al., 2006a, Morrongiello et al., 2006b) and corresponded to what Cohen describes as ‘moderate’ to ‘large’ effects (.25 to .40). Hence, for power of .80 and significance at .05, the necessary total sample size was estimated to be between 26 and 62.

The

How many safety rules did parents report and did this vary with child age?

The percentage of the 38 rules that parents indicated they were teaching their child was computed and an ANOVA with age (2: young, old) as a between-participant factor was applied to this score. The data for each rule are separately given in Table 1. Results revealed that parents had more rules for children in the older age group than the younger age group (M = 61% or 23/38 rules versus 49% or 18/38 rules, SD = 17% and 16%, respectively), F (1, 56) = 7.80, p < .01, ƞp2 = .22. However, even the older age

Discussion

Although past research has found that teaching safety rules is an injury prevention strategy frequently used by parents of young children, studies have focused mostly on examining parents' supervision of children and their modifications to reduce hazards in the environment. Surprisingly little is known about the nature and/or scope of parental teaching of safety rules. The current study addressed these gaps in the literature, including assessing for differences in these parental teaching

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the families for their participation and the staff at the Child Development Research Unit for their assistance with data collection, coding and data entry. The first author was supported by a Canada Research Chair award, and the research was supported by grants to the first author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Reprints can be requested from the first author at [email protected].

References (53)

  • M. Conner et al.

    Predicting health behavior: Research and practice with social-cognitive models

    (2005)
  • A. Gärling et al.

    Mothers' supervision and perception of young children's risk of unintentional injury in the home

    Journal of Pediatric Psychology

    (1993)
  • A. Gärling et al.

    Mothers' anticipation and prevention of unintentional injury to young children in the home

    Journal of Pediatric Psychology

    (1995)
  • E.S. Geller et al.

    Instructions as a determinant of paper-disposal behaviors

    Environment and Behavior

    (1976)
  • A.C. Gielen et al.

    Application of behavior-change theories and methods to injury prevention

    Epidemiology Reviews

    (2003)
  • A.C. Gielen et al.

    Injury and violence prevention

    (2006)
  • A.C. Gielen et al.

    In-home injury prevention practices for infants and toddlers: The role of parental beliefs, barriers, and housing quality

    Health Education Quarterly

    (1995)
  • J.H. Gralinski et al.

    Everyday rules for behavior: Mothers' requests to young children

    Developmental Psychology

    (1993)
  • W.A. Harrell

    Dangerous activities by children in grocery carts: Is adult supervision important?

    Psychological Reports

    (2003)
  • A. Harvey et al.

    Injury prevention and the attainment of child and adolescent health

    Bulletin of the World Health Organization

    (2009)
  • H.S. Hillman et al.

    The acquisition and maintenance of fire emergency skills: Effects of rationale and behavioral practice

    Journal of Pediatric Psychology

    (1986)
  • R.T. Jones et al.

    Social validation and training of emergency fire safety skills for potential injury prevention and life-saving

    Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis

    (1981)
  • B. Kelly et al.

    Safety education in a pediatric primary care setting

    Pediatrics

    (1987)
  • S. Mayes et al.

    Children's knowledge of household safety rules

    Children's Health Care

    (2006)
  • B.A. Morrongiello et al.

    Understanding unintentional injury-risk in young children I. The nature and scope of caregiver supervision of children at home

    Journal of Pediatric Psychology

    (2006)
  • B.A. Morrongiello et al.

    Understanding unintentional injury risk in young children II. The contribution of caregiver supervision, child attributes, and parent attributes

    Journal of Pediatric Psychology

    (2006)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text