Where my cell phone is, my 3-year-old usually isn’t. I’m not ready to pay the New York-to-Hong Kong rate. But news that a little boy in Scotland not only called emergency services on a cell phone when his mother collapsed but found a new mobile when the battery cut out makes me wonder.
Should my daughter be logging more time on the phone?
Three-year-old Jack Thomson called the UK version of 911 – 999 – when he found his mother lying unconscious on the hallway floor. With his father at work, the only other people in the house were his sisters, both younger. When the first phone went dead, Jack didn’t give up. He found another phone and dialed 999. Emergency workers broke into the apartment and saved Jack’s mom, Leanne, but they said she might have died if it weren’t for the 3-year-old’s fast thinking.
It’s made me start thinking about when we should start teaching our daughter how to act in an emergency. Jack Thomson is proof enough that 3 isn’t too young.
The biggest concern, of course, is how to convey when and where a 911-call is appropriate. We don’t need her calling police because Mommy has said no lollipops before dinner, and we don’t want her trying to call her grandparents by dialing 9 . . . 1 . . Kids need to understand the “emergency” concept and the dire consequences of prank calls to the emergency control center, something a 3-year-old isn’t likely to understand.
At this age it’s about teaching them the basics of how to place a call and what numbers to dial (always say nine, one, one rather than nine, eleven so they don’t start looking for an eleven on the phone), telling them it’s OK to be scared, telling them Mommy and Daddy sometimes need help from the police or the firemen, and then crossing our fingers that they never need to make that call.
Source: BBC News
Image: Phil Scoville
