Jodie Plumert, University of Iowa – Understanding Safety

How a child learns about the concept of safety depends greatly on the conversations they have with their parents.

Jodie Plumert, professor and chair in the Department of Psychology at the University of Iowa, conducted an experiment in order to understand how safety and danger are perceived.

Jodie M. Plumert is Professor and Chair in the Department of Psychology at the University of Iowa. Dr. Plumert received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota in 1990. Her research interests include spatial cognition and communication, perceptual-motor development, and unintentional childhood injuries. She directs the Spatially Organized Thinking Lab and co-directs the Hank Virtual Environments Lab with Dr. Joe Kearney in the Computer Science Department. Dr. Plumert is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. She has served on the executive committee of APA Division 7 and as an associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Jodie Plumert – Understanding Safety

One of the biggest worries for any parent is keeping their child safe from injury. It’s pretty simple when kids are young, because parents constantly keep an eye on them.But as children grow older and become more independent, they need to learn how to act safely without constant adult supervision. And that’s where parent-child conversations about safety come in. Conversations about safety happen pretty frequently, and we think that parents use these conversations to socialize good safety practices in their children.

We studied this by asking mothers and their 8- or 10-year-old children to view photos of another child doing a variety of physical activities. Their job was to discuss each photo and come up with a safety rating for the activity.

We found that mothers pointed out many more dangerous elements in the situations than their children did, and they often drew connections between those dangerous elements and bad outcomes. For example, when viewing a child reaching over a red-hot burner to pick up a pan on a back burner, mothers would point out that the burner was very hot and that the child’s sleeve could catch on fire.

Not surprisingly, mothers and children initially disagreed on quite a few of the safety ratings. But in almost all of those cases, mothers brought children around to their way of thinking. These instances of disagreement about safety may be especially important because they generate a lot of discussion between parents and children about why an activity might be dangerous. Helping children understand why something might be dangerous is critical for socializing good safety practices in children.

In a nutshell, these parent-child conversations about safety help kids develop that little voice in the back of their head that keeps them from doing dangerous stuff when they’re out on their own.

Read More: Safety First, Children