Abstract
Objective: Teaching safety rules is a common way parents attempt to moderate injury risk for elementary-school children, but few studies have examined the nature of this teaching. The present study explored whether mothers’ safety rules varied with type of injury (falls, poisoning, burns and cuts), the nature of these teaching strategies about rules, and how effective these rules were to moderate children’s risk behaviour when in a setting having ‘contrived’ hazards that were targeted by these rules.
Methods: Mothers completed an interview about safety rules, and children’s behaviour was unobtrusively observed in a ‘contrived hazards’ situation having hazards relevant to falls, poisoning, burns and cuts.
Results: Mothers had significantly fewer rules addressing fall risks than other types of injuries, and fall-related rules were highly hazard-specific in nature, rather than aimed at teaching general principles for appraising fall risks. For all types of injuries except falls, children interacted with fewer hazards for which there were rules.
Conclusions: Rules can have preventive properties that can serve to moderate children’s interacting with hazards when alone, but this seems to vary depending on the type of rule that has been taught. Given that falls are a leading cause of injury hospitalization for children and that parents are not emphasizing fall prevention as much as other types of injuries, efforts should be extended to promote parents’ shifting their prevention approaches to better address this particular injury risk.
Key words: Falls, children, risk appraisals, parents
Résumé
Objectif: C’est en leur enseignant les règles de sécurité que les parents d’enfants fréquentant l’école primaire essaient en général de modérer les risques qu’ils se blessent, mais peu d’études se sont penchées sur la nature de cet enseignement. Nous avons voulu déterminer si les règles de sécurité des mères variaient selon le type de blessure (chutes, empoisonnements, brûlures et coupures) et étudier la nature de leurs stratégies d’enseignement et l’efficacité des règles pour modérer la propension des enfants à prendre des risques dans un lieu semé de dangers « artificiels » correspondant aux règles.
Méthode: Les mères se sont prêtées à un entretien sur les règles de sécurité, et le comportement de leurs enfants a été observé discrètement dans une situation de « dangers artificiels » correspondant aux chutes, aux empoisonnements, aux brûlures et aux coupures.
Résultats: Les mères avaient beaucoup moins de règles sur les risques de chute que pour les autres types de blessures, et les règles liées aux chutes étaient très précises plutôt que d’enseigner des principes généraux permettant d’évaluer les risques de tomber. Pour tous les types de blessures sauf les chutes, les enfants ont interagi avec un moins grand nombre de « dangers » contre lesquels il existait des règles.
Conclusion: Les règles peuvent avoir un effet préventif qui modère les interactions des enfants avec les dangers lorsqu’ils sont seuls, mais cela semble varier selon le type de règles enseignées. Étant donné que les chutes accidentelles sont l’une des principales causes d’hospitalisation pour blessures chez les enfants, et que les parents n’insistent pas sur la prévention des chutes autant que sur les autres types de blessures, il faudrait faire des efforts pour encourager les parents à modifier leurs approches de prévention afin de les axer davantage sur ce risque de blessure en particulier.
Mots clés: chutes accidentelles, enfant, évaluation du risque, parents
Footnotes
Conflict of Interest: None to declare.
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