Helping parents to protect pre-school children from accidents

One in every five children, aged 0 to 4, requires hospital treatment for an accident every year, and nearly 300 die from their injuries. Children from lower income families are much more likely to be killed in an accident than the children in other families. Parents and carers need to know how to prevent accidents, and how to help their children learn to avoid danger. Group training is not an effective way to reach parents from lower income groups; a direct approach to individual parents supported by a professional, such as a Health Visitor, seemed both the most successful and the most welcome to parents. Materials for parents should be developmental, colourful, with a low reading age, and distributed either through welfare channels or through some commercial organisation serving lower income families. This report reviews the need for additional safety materials, describes the development and design of four booklets providing safety advice for the parents of young children and reports the pre-experimental evaluation of the first booklet, for the parents of babies between birth and nine months old. (A)