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