Teaching Fire Safety For Children – The Basics

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It is important that parents, teachers and other child centered organizations are aware of fire safety for children and to teach it appropriately based on the ages of the children. Preschoolers need rudimentary knowledge and awareness of the dangers of fire, while as the children grow up, they also need to be aware of how to cook and handle fire safely as they use it in everyday lives.

Plans and Tips

One of the most important things that parents can teach their children is how to exit their house in the case of a fire. Fire safety for children in this area means that the parents will come up with a written fire safety plan so that every room of the house is covered and there is more than one exit route from any room. This needs to be explained to the children, posted in a prominent place in the house, and most importantly, needs to be practiced. Parents need to implement drills like they do in schools and certain work places to test the family’s knowledge of the escape plan. This should be done at night and during the day in order to teach adequate fire safety for children. Children should not only know how to get out of the house but also where the meeting place is for after they escape. In addition, they need to be taught not to run from fire fighters, but to yell for help if they are trapped so that the fire fighters can find them.

Another way of teaching fire safety to children is to explain what to do when they find matches or lighters. For younger children, they must be told not to play with these items at all, but to hand them immediately over to adults as soon as possible. For older children, such as teenagers, who are ready to start helping with the grill, lighting candles, or other appliances that utilize lighters or matches, they need to be taught how to properly use these materials so that it is done with safety.

Fire safety for children also requires schools and other child-centered organizations to perform the same drills and have the same fire safety plans that parents do at home. In addition, they can also provide field trips to the fire station so that young children can meet fire fighters and see them in their full clothing so that they are not as scared if there is a fire and think that the fire fighter is a monster. In addition, fire safety for children requires schools to teach young children how to stop, drop and roll, which is important for parents to reinforce at home as well.