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Keeping Your Child Safe From Accidents En Español (Spanish Version)
Every year, 20% to 25% of all children require medical treatment, days home from school, and/or bed rest due to accidents. Every year, 120,000 children suffer some form of permanent damage due to accidents, such as permanent brain damage from a head injury, long-term breathing problems from smoke inhalation, disfigurement from burns, or liver or kidney damage from poisoning.
The main causes include:
- Motor vehicle accidents (with the injured child as a passenger, pedestrian, or bicycle rider)
- Drowning
- Burns
- Choking, suffocation
- Firearms
- Falls
- Poisoning
Motor vehicle accidents injure children either when they are riding in a vehicle as a passenger or are hit by a vehicle when they are a pedestrian or a bicycle rider. Children who are not properly secured in car seats or booster seats are at particularly high risk.
Follow these tips to help keep your kids safe:
- Use a properly secured car seat for all babies, toddlers, and children.
- Read all the materials that come with your car seat to make sure you know how to adjust it and secure it, and to find out the height and weight specifications.
- Consider stopping in at your local police or fire station or attending a car seat clinic to make sure you’re using your child’s car seat properly.
- When your child outgrows his or her car seat, use a booster seat until your child is 80 pounds, and about 4 feet, 9 inches tall.
- Always use your own safety belt in order to keep yourself safe and provide a good model for children.
- The backseat is the safest place for children to ride.
- Never use a rear-facing car seat in a front passenger seat with an airbag.
- Children under 12 should never sit in a passenger seat equipped with an air bag; if your teenager sits on the passenger side, make sure the seat is moved as far back as possible, and tilt it back slightly to keep at least 10 inches between the air bag panel and the child’s chest/abdomen.
- Teach your children how to carefully cross a street.
- Your child should always wear a bike helmet when bicycling, riding a scooter or skateboard, or rollerskating/blading.
Babies and toddlers often drown when unsupervised in the bath. Toddlers are at risk for drowning in very small quantities of water, including the amount in a cleaning bucket, a toilet, or a child’s wading pool. Preschoolers are at great risk when unsupervised around swimming pools or ponds. Older children are at risk when they do not know how to swim, are not familiar with water safety rules, or dive into shallow water.
What can you do to keep your kids safe?
- Supervise your children carefully around any water/
- Dress your child in a US Coast Guard-approved life jacket when you are at the beach or boating; inflatable toys are not lifesaving devices and should never be thought of as such.
- Stay right next to the bathtub while your baby, toddler, or preschooler is bathing.
- Empty wading pools and buckets when you’re done using them.
- Keep the lid on your toilet down and your bathroom door closed.
- If you have a swimming pool, make sure it has a complete fencing system and an alarm that sounds if anything enters the water.
- Enroll your children in swimming and water safety courses at about age four, but don’t let this lower your guard or decrease your level of supervision.
- Teach older children never to dive into a body of water unless the depth is known to be over nine feet (or 11.5 feet if diving from a platform).
Younger children have a particularly high rate of scalding from exposure to hot water. Burn injuries also frequently occur when a child’s clothing catches fire.
To help keep you kids safe, follow these measures:
- Make sure that your children sleep in fire-retardant sleepwear.
- Keep your hot water temperature no higher than 120°-125°.
- Always carefully check the bathwater to make sure it’s not too hot before you put your baby or child in; it should be under 100°.
- Your house should have approved smoke alarms on every level in a main hall and in every bedroom; check the batteries every month.
- Contact your local fire department to attend a fire safety course.
- Plan an escape route for your family; consult with your local fire department regarding safety apparatus for your home.
- Teach your kids to “stop, drop, and roll” if their clothing should ever catch fire.
- Teach your children to never play with matches, candles, or other sources of flame.
- Before your children start using playground equipment in the summer, make sure that it hasn’t grown so hot in the sun that it could cause a burn.
- Keep hot foods and liquids away from the edge of counters or tables where small children could reach them.
- Gate off your cooking area so children can’t approach the stove.
- Be sure that your electrical outlets have child-proof plugs. Make sure that toddlers don’t chew on electrical cords.
Foods such as hot dogs, hard candy, grapes, popcorn, and nuts—especially peanuts—are common culprits in choking deaths. Small toys (tiny rubber balls), too-small pacifiers, and bits of balloons are common non-food choking hazards. Children also are at-risk for becoming entangled in the ties on hoods, the strings that control window blinds, toys strung across cribs, and cords used to attach pacifiers to clothing.
What can you do to keep your kids safe?
- Don’t feed toddlers grapes, hard candy, popcorn, nuts, or raw vegetables.
- Make sure your children stay seated while eating.
- Always supervise your child while he or she is eating.
- Learn the Heimlich maneuver and CPR techniques appropriate for your children’s ages.
- Purchase a "choke tube" which is used to test the size of small toys, objects, or pieces of food before you let your baby or toddler use them. Objects that are small enough to go through the choke tube can also pass into a child’s airway and obstruct breathing. Choke tubes can be found in many children’s stores and on the internet.
- Never let your child chew on or mouth a balloon; never leave your child unsupervised with a balloon.
- Encourage your older children to use toys with small parts in a room that your younger children can’t access.
- Don’t dress your children in clothing with drawstrings at the neck, or hoods that tie.
- Use a cord safety kit on all window blinds and curtains to prevent strangulation.
Firearms can cause severe injury and devastation. Accidents occur due to accidental discharge of a firearm, as well as due to their use during the commitment of homicide or suicide.
To keep your kids safe:
- Do not store firearms in your home.
- Teach your children to call you immediately if they are playing at a friend’s home and there are firearms.
- Teach your children never to touch or play with a gun, and to immediately report to an adult if they see any other child touching or playing with a gun.
- If you must keep firearms in your home, store them unloaded in a locked location, with the ammunition stored in a separate, locked location; use gunlocks.
- Take a gun safety course.
Falls are a frequent cause of injury in children. Babies are at risk of falling from furniture, down stairs, or due to the use of baby walkers. Both toddlers and preschoolers are at risk for falling from windows and shopping carts. Older children tend to receive injuries falling from playground equipment or scooters.
What can you do to keep your kids safe?
- Don’t use a baby walker.
- Keep your child seated in the grocery cart’s safety seat and stroller, and always buckle the waist straps.
- Don’t allow children to play unattended or to stand on furniture close to windows.
- Before your child begins to play on a playground, inspect it for safety and make sure that there is reasonably thickly padded surface (9-12 inches deep of loose fill or a specially-made rubber resilient surface) to cushion falls under all of the play structures.
- Supervise your children closely at the playground.
- Encourage your child to use developmentally-appropriate playground equipment; your toddler may be able to climb the higher slide, but may not have the judgment to avoid an accident.
- Your child should always wear a bike helmet when bicycling, riding a scooter or skateboard, or rollerskating/blading.
Poisoning in childhood is frequently due to household cleaning products, medicines, vitamin supplements, plants, and cosmetics. Toddlers and preschoolers may be attracted to medicines and vitamins because they resemble candy; cleaning products may look like sweet beverages; cosmetics may smell like fruit or candy. Because young children explore the world by putting things in their mouths, poisoning is a serious risk. To keep your kids safe
:
- Keep a bottle of syrup of ipecac on hand in case your child ingests a poison; regularly check the expiration date and record it on your calendar so you know when to buy a fresh bottle
***
Please note:
On Nov. 3, 2003, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released a new policy statement, entitled the
Poison Treatment in the Home
, recommending that syrup of ipecac no longer be used as a routine home treatment strategy; rather, it should be used only on the direct advice of a doctor or poison control center. The key reason for this policy change is that recent research has failed to show benefit for children who were treated with ipecac. Most emergency rooms have stopped using the drug in favor of the more effective activated charcoal. As well, research has shown that ipecac medication has been improperly administered by parents and has been abused by people with eating disorders such as bulimia. Abuse of ipecac can lead to heart problems and even death.
- Don’t use the syrup of ipecac or induce vomiting until you’ve checked to make sure that the poison control center recommends ipecac for the substance your child has taken.
- Keep the poison prevention center’s number next to your telephone. If you have a poisoning emergency, call 1-800-222-1222.
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Keep all medicines, cleaning supplies, and cosmetics in a high, locked cabinet.
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A study looked at emergency room visits for poisonings. These are the most common substances that children aged five and under swallowed:
- Medications (prescription and over-the-counter) and supplements—most common
- Cleaning products
- Topical medications and ointments
- Personal care products
- Only buy medicines and cleaning supplies with child-resistant caps.
- Before you bring a plant into your home, check to see if it is poisonous if eaten; some common, popular plants are quite toxic, including holly, poinsettia, foxglove, and many others.
- Kerosene, gasoline, and oil-containing furniture polishes are among the most dangerous household substances for children. If at all possible, do not keep these in your home.
These safety tips are by no means exhaustive; those listed are only the most basic of safety rules. You’ll also notice that the most consistent rule across every category is close supervision: No safety efforts can substitute for careful, consistent adult supervision. The children who are most at risk for accidental injury or death are those children who are not well-supervised by adults.
American Association of Poison Control Centers American Red Cross Health and Safety Services National SAFE Kids Campaign, SafeChild.net of Consumer Federation of America Foundation
American Association of Poison Control Centers website. Available at:
http://www.aapcc.org
. Accessed July 14, 2003.
Dowd M, Keenan D, Bratton H. Epidemiology and prevention of childhood injuries.
Critical Care Med
. 2002;30:385-392.
Rivara F, Grossman D. Injury control.
Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics
. 16th ed. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 2000:231-237.
¹1/13/2009 DynaMed's Systematic Literature Surveillance
DynaMed's Systematic Literature Surveillance
: Franklin RL, Rodger GB. Unintentional child poisonings treated in United States hospital emergency departments: national estimates of incident cases, population-based poisoning rates, and product involvement.
Pediatrics.
2008;122:1244-1251.
Last Reviewed March 2008
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