Can Children Become Proactive in their own Safety??

Question

I’m always looking for ways to make my children’s life safer, but with more than half the products I have in my house that says, "Keep out of reach of Children it’s hard to keep them safe. I have all the safety gadgets but they get into everything. I was reading a parent magazine and read a write-up called “Mr. No-No Saves Children’s Lives”. Read your kids the book then put stickers of Mr. No-No on things you don't want your children to touch. It says they did a case study on infants to preteens and they documented a one-year-old baby would not touch anything Mr. No-No was on including his stuffed bear. So I went on line, I noticed there are a couple other safety characters, but they are stupid. Looks like allot of time and effort went into Mr. No-No. Some characters were just outright pathetic. Would it be easier for children to learn to stay away from Mr. No-No or just try to keep teaching them all places & things not to touch? Check it out www.mrnono.com let me know what you think.

Answer 1

I think the idea of Mr NoNo has its merrits. I remember a day when my daughter had come home from daycare aged 4 with a bunch of stickers issued by our electricity company. Each sticker said something simple about safety around electricity. My daughter took it upon herself to put these stickers above every powerpoint she could reac to remind us all!

If you do use the Mr NoNo idea I would suggest letting your children tell you what things they think might be a danger and let them help you place the stickers, and while doing so explain why that particular thing is a danger.

Answer 2

For my household I have Mr. Yuck Stickers on the things that are poisionous, and the other thing I did with my children, is cut out large red T's and put them on things that they should not be touching. I explained to them (at that time they were 3 and 1) that the T means NO TOUCH. If you continue to follow through with this it does work very well.

Good Luck
Kathy

Answer 3

i think, if children become proactive in thier own safety, that the outcome can only be great, even if the characters and stickers are stupid. nothing is more important than a childs safety! pretty wierd how they will go by what a sticker says, and not listen to thier parents. if it works, its great!

Answer 4

I think safety is very important and that it's very important that kids understand WHY it's important.
Mr. No-No looks scary, though! If I were a kid, I think he'd give me nightmares. Not that you want him to look pleasant so they want to play with him, but he reminds me of the scary trolls in stories we saw in school. I think that might be overkill.
(At the risk of sounding prejudiced about looks.)