Motor development as a context for understanding parent safety practices

In most industrialized countries, injuries are the leading cause of death for children 1 through 18 years of age. For infants, many injuries occur in the home when they are acquiring new motor milestones. Thus, as infants' motor competencies change with development, creating increasing opportunities for them to interact with hazards, parent safety strategies need to adapt in synchrony in order to sustain a safe ecological niche and prevent injuries. The present study examined parent safety practices when infants were pre-mobile (i.e., capable of sitting independently) and mobile (i.e., capable of walking independently), with the goal being to examine how parents alter these practices in the context of changes in infant motor capabilities, what motivates these parenting changes, and how well they work to prevent injuries. For pre-mobile infants, parents often used devices to constrain their infants' movements and they did so primarily for convenience; mobile infants were seldom constrained. Supervision was a safety strategy applied at both stages, but parents maintained greater proximity for pre-mobile than mobile infants. Environmental modifications were also used for mobile infants. Parental supervision was negatively associated with injuries in the preceding month, whereas environmental modifications were positively associated with injuries. Parents at both stages rated their infants' behaviors as highly predictable but expected them to become less predictable in the near future. However, they also anticipated reducing supervision and increasing teaching during this timeframe. Implications of these findings for injury prevention are discussed.