How to encourage road safety in your kids

With millions of cars on the road (and even more roads being built) road safety is even more important to teach your child and this week it is the focus of our discussion in the hangout we do regularly with Beckie Whitehouse.

So, how do we start to explain about roads?  What is the best way?

Teaching good practice from an early age will instil road safety and road confidence as your child grows and develops.  Right from the start, even when your child is still in a pushchair, use words such as “it’s safe to cross” “now is good to go”.  Never just use the word “OK” in case your child thinks it’s safe to cross whenever he hears the word.

Encourage your child to look both ways when crossing the road.  Get them used to looking for all manners of transport, not just cars.  Motorbikes can sometimes come from nowhere and, although a pedal bike may seem slow, it get close to you very quickly if you misjudge it.

Other ways to encourage road safety are:

• Sit on a bench and watch the traffic whilst you are at the shops or at the park.  Get your child used to different speeds of traffic and the flow,
• Teach your child that, even if a car stops to allow you to cross the road, you MUST STILL look in the other direction to make sure there is nothing coming,
• When out in the car yourself, talk to your child about overtaking.  The bike you are stuck behind may be very slow but if you have a corner ahead you cannot see what is coming in the other direction,
• Life is not like a cartoon: if a car hits you, you are very unlikely to get up and walk away.  You could get very hurt,
• Teach your child not to run over roads or even near roads.  Do not walk on the kerb in case you slip into the road,
• Be careful with driveways, a car could come in or out at any time.

Here is the chat we had with Beckie:

Apologies for the lost connection at the end of the hangout – it seemed technology let us down. However, the content is still very useful – so here you go; still a great 5 minutes of useful info!

How have you taught your child road safety?  Have we missed anything? As ever, please leave your comments below:

Helen

Helen is a mum to two, social media consultant, and website editor; and this site is (we think) the only Social Enterprise parenting magazine!Since giving up being a business analyst when juggling travel, work and kids proved too complicated, she founded KiddyCharts so she could be with her kids, and use those grey cells at the same time.KiddyCharts has reach of over 1.1million across social and the site. The blog works with big family brands (including travel) to help promote their services, as well as offering free resources to parents of kids under 10.It gives 51%+ profits to Reverence for Life, who fund a number of important initiatives in Africa, including bringing running water and basic equipment to a school in Tanzania.Helen has worked as a digital marketing consultant (IDM qualified) with various organisations, including Channel Mum, Truprint, Talk to Mums, and Micro Scooters. She loves to be creative in the brand campaigns she works on.Get in touch TODAY!

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