"You Don't Want to See Your Kids Fail": The Role of Parents in Teaching Farm Safety to Adolescents

Farm youth acquired safety knowledge through observing their parents, receiving formal training, and being supervised during new tasks. Parent-youth pairs perceived youth farm injury risk as low, expressing confidence in the effectiveness of their existing safety practices. Parent-youth pairs acknowledged inconsistent adherence to their farm safety measures.

Youth remain at great risk for injuries and fatalities on farms, particularly on family farms where home and workplace blur together. While farming hazards are well-documented, less is known about youth interactions with these hazards and the most effective strategies for providing safety training, underscoring the need to better protect this vulnerable population. This qualitative study explored the strategies that adolescents and their parents on family farms use to protect working youth from serious farm injuries and assessed the perceived effectiveness of these safety strategies. Thirty semi-structured Zoom interviews were conducted separately with fifteen parent-youth dyads. All participants lived and worked on family farms in southeastern Iowa. Youth reported learning about farm safety through training, observing their parents, and being supervised while performing new tasks. Both parents and youth identified open communication as a key element of farm safety strategies. Participants perceived the risk of youth farm injuries occurring on their farm as low, attributing this to their confidence in the effectiveness of the safety measures they implemented (e.g., training, protective equipment). However, while most participants expressed confidence in their safety training and strategies, they also acknowledged inconsistent adherence to them. These findings contribute to the body of knowledge on youth safety in agriculture, particularly in understanding how family farms protect working youth from injury, how parents deliver farm safety guidance to youth, and how effective farm safety measures are perceived to be.