Advancing our understanding of mothers' safety rules for school-age children

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.

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.

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.

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.