Child Alerts Family to Fire Danger

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:01:00 GMT

Thanks in part to a young child, 22 people were safely evacuated from a burning apartment building.

In Clarkston, Georgia, a fire started around 1:30 a.m. in the kitchen of one unit in the building. A young boy woke up when he smelled smoke. He immediately woke up his family, who rushed out of the building along with their neighbors. None of the building’s occupants was hurt.

This is similar to a recent event in Arizona, in which a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old saved their family from a house fire after they smelled smoke and heard popping noises. Their parents said that they, too, had heard the noises, but thought nothing of them and had gone back to sleep. But the kids got out of bed, noticed smoke in the living room, and immediately woke up their parents, who were able to put out the fire before it caused much damage.

Go kids! It seems their heightened awareness to any and all changes to their environment has some very important advantages.

Photo: Flickr

Teaching Fire Safety: How to Scare the Crap out of Your Kids

Karen Murphy — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 11:33:00 GMT

"Stop, drop, and roll." Words to strike fear into the heart of third graders the world over. When I was in 3rd grade we had two field trips, one to the Hershey factory in California (AWESOME!), and the other to a fire station (FREAKING SCARY!). I had fire-related nightmares for years afterward.

My second-grader has some sort of fire safety presentation this week, and my preschooler saw fire trucks today, and I'm steeling myself for the inevitable nightmares that are going to result. Would a life-sized robotic Dalmatian help, I wonder?

Maybe so. I'm totally on board with teaching kids about safety and what to do in various emergency circumstances, but does it have to be scary? Can't we somehow empower our kids instead of frighten them? I'd like my kids to feel confident in an emergency rather than paralyzed from panic. I tried to preempt the situation a little by introducing my second-grader to some fire safety topics ahead of her school presentation, and within minutes her eyes grew big and round as saucers so I knew it was time to stop.

So how do you strike a balance between scaring the crap out of your kids unnecessarily and arming them with information they might one day need to know?

Strollerderby : fire safety

Child Alerts Family to Fire Danger

Teaching Fire Safety: How to Scare the Crap out of Your Kids