October 4th, 2010
By Whitney
There is a fine line between telling kids what they need to know and giving them too much information. When it comes to safety, I wrestle with this one.
I don’t want my children to worry needlessly about death. I have assured them that people don’t die until they get to be very old, usually around 100. And lucky for us, we haven’t had to discuss any exceptions during their lifetimes. They have two great-grandfathers in their nineties and my son definitely believes those guys will simply keep living as they are each day until their 100th birthday at which time they will not wake up. I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that story. We can correct it when the time comes.
Yesterday, in the car my three-year-old daughter tossed a plastic container lid up to the front seat. It hit my husband on the head. We pulled over and I told her sternly that we do not throw things in the car. I specifically explained why not, that if the driver gets hit, he might close his eyes or turn his head, taking his eyes off the road and crashing the car. I felt like this was relevant and a quite legitimate reason that we don’t throw things at the driver.
My daughter usually interprets the consequences of unsafe actions to be that you might fall “and then you will cry.” Crying being the ultimate of disasters, it seems. Now that they have watched me endure a broken foot, I can give other examples of consequences. There is pain, there is the scary hospital visit (they have built me up as brave for having visited the hospital), and of course there are things like uncomfortable casts or not being able to play soccer. Still, nothing over which to lose sleep.
At what point do I reveal the more extreme consequences that we are trying to avoid by not leaning out the window, running across the street, or undoing seatbelts before the car stops moving – namely, death? I have skirted the issue due to the “people die around age 100” myth that we have introduced, but my son is starting elementary school next month. Maybe it’s time he knows the truth.
When did you teach your child the ugly truth about life’s real dangers?
Tags: children, Safety
Posted in Kids, Safety | No Comments »
August 11th, 2009
By Whitney
To buckle and unbuckle one’s own seatbelt ranks high in a toddler’s list of life’s most satisfying accomplishments. My four-and-a-half year old son does both by himself. My two-year old daughter once spent more than 30 minutes in a large baby gear shop playing with the floor model strollers, buckling herself in and then asking me to unbuckle her so that she could move to the next stroller. Repeat. Repeat. I’ve heard from other parents that their children are equally obsessed.
And on the airplane? To release, simply lift the metal buckle and pull. We’ve all heard it hundreds of times. Suddenly your child has a new, easier-to-open buckle, enticing with its novel shape, weight and texture. For some kids, this temptation will be too much. They’ll spend the duration of the flight buckling and unbuckling, and driving you crazy.
But it’s dangerous. And I’m not talking about pinched fingers. Since you’re a grown up, I don’t need to explain why buckles must stay buckled. I’ll save my safety lecture for my kids.
I’ll give you a trick I just learned from another smart parent on the web: Cut the foot off of a tube sock so that you are left with just a tube. Now you have a seatbelt buckle cozy. Bring it on the plane and slide it over your child’s seatbelt buckle to remove access to the temptations of clicking and unclicking that might drive you off the deep end over the course of a flight.
P.S. This tip comes to you courtesy of ParentHacks.com where creative parents shared two other uses for this same piece of tube sock: 1) Place it over itchy bug bites on arms or legs to prevent scratching and 2) Use it to hide the smell emanating from a strap that’s been thrown up on.
You’re welcome.
Tags: buckle, children, home, Kids, Safety, seatbelts, UL
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
January 26th, 2009
We are Heather Flett and Whitney Moss and we’ll be your hostesses on this blog. We both live in Berkeley, CA and we both have two children. Since becoming moms, we struggle to balance keeping everyone safe with having fun. This blog will explore some of the many aspects of safety as we face it in our everyday lives. We hope you’ll join us and help make this blog a dialogue that we can all learn from.
We write another blog together at RookieMoms.com and just published our first book, The Rookie Mom’s Handbook.
We love hot chocolate, comfortable shoes, and the television show Lost, but that’s where the similarities end. Now we need to stop using “we” and introduce ourselves separately.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: baby, Berkeley, blog, California, children, daughter, environment, Heather, Heather Flett, mom, mother, Rookie, Rookiemoms.com, Safety, son, UL, Whitney, Whitney Moss
Posted in Events, Holidays, Kids, Safety | 7 Comments »
