Beyond car seats and childproof pill bottles: A child psychologist explains how to empower kids to make safer choices

Unintentional injuries kill more than 7,000 children ages 1-19 in the U.S. each year – close to 20 deaths per day. Injuries are the leading cause of child death, and these injuries are often preventable.

Prevention takes many forms. Government policy helps tremendously. As an example, regulations requiring carbon monoxide detectors allowed people to prevent or escape dangerous carbon monoxide buildup in their homes. Engineering innovations help also; car seats, child-resistant medication lids and soft playground surfaces each prevent countless injuries and deaths.

A third pillar to child injury prevention is behavioral: To a surprisingly large degree, the adults in children’s lives can change the math on injury risks.

As a child psychologist who has studied child injury prevention for three decades and authored the book “Raising Kids Who Choose Safety,” I study ways to change human behavior and reduce the burden of child injury.

Since adults are better able to recognize injury risks than children, they are often in a position to intervene before injuries occur. And children can also promote their own safety when they follow safety rules and, especially as they get older, make safe decisions.

Of course, adults can’t always predict or prepare their child for every situation. People inevitably encounter unexpectedly broken playground equipment, dangerous intersections or icy walkways. But here are some research-backed approaches that adults can adopt to work toward creating a family culture of safety – thereby guiding children to make safer choices as they grow.

Knowledge is power

Don’t underestimate the power of direct instruction. Children can learn simple safety rules by about age 2: “Don’t go past the sidewalk” or “Don’t pet the dog when it is sleeping.”

As children grow older, parents can teach more complex skills – handling fire while lighting holiday candles, for example, or managing neighborhood traffic when cycling to school.

Teaching safety works best when people encounter potential hazards during their daily activities – pedestrian safety while walking through a supermarket parking lot or knife safety while preparing lunch. It’s easy to gloss over these teaching moments for activities that are so routine to adults, but research shows that talking through them with children in real time helps prevent injuries.

Active prevention

One tried and true safety tactic, especially for young children, is placing safeguards that prevent access to dangerous items or situations – for example, installing cabinet locks, stair gates and outlet covers.

Another key action is supervision. Adults supervising children must balance three elements, depending on the circumstances: how intensely they watch, how close they are to the child, and how continuous their attention is. Near water, proximity makes it easier to physically intervene if needed. On playgrounds, verbal instead of physical warnings are often sufficient, so continuity is more critical.

A fourth element of supervision arises in certain situations, such as backyard swimming: competence. Detecting when children are drowning can be difficult because they may sink underwater without visibly struggling. If a child is in distress in the water, knowing how to rescue them and provide CPR can be lifesaving.

Do as I do

Children learn by watching people they trust. That means parents’ and caregivers’ actions concerning safety are especially important.

Even though children notoriously love to test the limits of parental rules, studies suggest that parents who restrain from distracted driving are more likely to have children who do the same, as are parents who wear bike helmets.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, children take notice when their parents do not always practice the safety lessons they preach. In one study, children ages 7-12 were aware that their parents’ own use of safety items like seat belts, bicycle helmets and sunscreen were significantly less common than the parents’ expectations for the child to use them.

Most children drew one of two mistaken conclusions from this observation – that taking safety measures was “for kids only” and less important for adults, or that adults possess some unique ability that overcomes the need for safety equipment.

Encouraging good choices

Frequent doses of guidance, praise and redirection can help good safety decisions take root as habits. Acknowledging a wise decision – grabbing a helmet on the way out for a bike ride, with a “Good thinking!” or a quick high-five, reinforces that decision.

Redirecting a bad idea – jumping off a balcony into a pile of leaves below – into a safer but still enjoyable activity encourages better future decisions.

The goal is not punishment or lectures; instead, small morsels of praise and redirection prime children to recognize risk on their own as they develop cognitive and physical capacity.