Encouraging Your Children To Stay Safe While Playing Outside
There’s a school of thought that says allowing children to go outside, to get in scrapes, to get dirty, and to potentially encounter injury from time to time strengthens them and helps them become more rounded individuals. Of course, it’s unlikely that the people who are happy with this idea feel great when it’s their own child that gets injured.
For this reason, it’s important to strike a healthy balance. Sure, allowing our children to spend hours on their games consoles each and every day isn’t healthy. But it’s not healthy to allow our children to indiscriminately go outside and explore anywhere they want without rules and borders because you never really know who is out there and you can’t protect against every little threat.
Every parent can take their own stance on this, and to what degree they enforce safety measures in keeping their children protected. Yet it’s also a good idea to start with the basics – that is, empowering our children to make good decisions rather than having to dictate their every movement as they become more independent. In this post, we hope to discuss this topic in a little depth:
Establish Borders
Ground rules can be necessary for obvious reasons and are a good way to help your children learn what is and what isn’t acceptable. Perhaps, for instance, you’ll let them ride their bikes outside, but not past the top of the road where it turns into a larger bypass with more vehicles. Or, perhaps you won’t let your younger children out of your garden so that you can keep total watch on them. Make sure they know this and enforce disciplinary measures so that they know how serious you are if they run off. This can be a way of ensuring your children know the gravity that is exposing themselves to unnecessary danger.
Be Wary of Strangers
It’s a great idea to use the classic warnings about talking to strangers, that is, your children never should. This can help them understand who to stay away from, and when to immediately come to you should someone try and prolong contact. This can also help them gradually understand the idea that while their home feels like home, it is also surrounded by people, and thus good sense must always be a part of the sensible play.
Caution & Injuries
Teaching your children to be cautious and not place themselves in danger is important, including climbing over things, up trees, cycling downhills too fast, etc. If injured, you should instruct your children to come directly to you or to the closest friend’s house so that the proper wound dressing can be applied. This immediate medical care can stop additional harm from taking place. Even something as simple as a cut or a scrape should be attended to because no matter how hardy children seem to be, it’s never a good idea to go for long periods without the proper attention a cut or bruise may deserve.
With this in mind, we hope your children can stay not just as safe as possible, but safe no matter what.
