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How SAFE is your kid?
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The past week has been horrific for children. How do we make the world safe for youngsters outside their homes, asks HEMANGINI GUPTA
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Our children are vulnerable beyond the relative safety of our homes. — Photo: M. Lakshman
FOUR-YEAR-old Gautami is never allowed to cross the road on her own. With very good reason. She's been told to look left and right, her mother explains, so Gautami tosses her head to the left and then, without even a second's pause, immediately to the right and then, this cursory adherence to parental instruction over, looks straight ahead of her while crossing the road.
Lesson? Never let young kids cross the road alone, of course. But we all know that. Warn them about electric wires, expose them to fire drills, caution them about strangers, be with them when they're crossing the road. Every parent who can do these things, does them. Yet, outside of the comparatively controlled home environment, so much could go wrong. Things that you either didn't expect or thought would never actually happen to your child.
This past week alone saw enough examples of children falling prey to the unpredictable environment beyond the safety of their homes. Seven-year-old Anish electrocuted by a tangle of live wires near his home; and nearly 100 children horrifically burnt to death in a school fire in Kumbakonam. How safe are our kids? And how conscious are we regarding their safety?
"I'm not at all worried about my kids," says Uma Balaram about her daughters, in Standards Nine and Five. Her kids are "safely brought up", she says, and adds: "Most of the time we're behind them, they are sent to school by van and when they are sent outside, we drop them." Her children are always monitored and their school is close to home, so if their van is late, someone rushes to find what went wrong.
But even with constant monitoring, there is a chance something could go wrong. Muthu Nanjapa's daughter Talia goes to school in a van whose driver Muthu has "gotten to know" and he has been repeatedly reminded to give the kids "individualised attention", she says. Their apartment elevator though is "a major scare for me," says Muthu, because "what does a child know if it gets stuck?" Talia has been told to climb the seven floors to their flat if there is no adult around, has been warned about strangers who might make unwanted contact and only strays as far as the play area of the apartment building. Parental behaviour may seem over-protective to an outsider, Muthu says, and boundaries vary from parent to parent but she explains her philosophy: "I just let my daughter be... they've got to learn from their own mistakes." Of course, she wouldn't want her child to suffer in the process. So where is that line between letting your child learn on her own, on the one hand, and giving her so much freedom that she finds herself in a situation she cannot handle, on the other?
"One of the things small kids need to pick up are boundaries," says educationalist Usha Mukunda. The young pick that up quickly, she says, but it is important to lay down clear guidelines. Kids become sure of what they can or cannot do (not about rules, but safety), learning from adults and peers. Some 99 per cent of children have an innate sense of what's right, she reasons, and adults need to rely on what she describes as children's "native intelligence". Most of the schools she has been involved with have sprawling campuses, outside the city limits, containing water bodies and thick shrubbery, often with snakes. One campus even had an open well, she remembers, but no one came to any harm because the teachers "made sure they clearly conveyed the dangers of the well, not based on unfounded fears, but on fact".
In a group, there's likely to be impulsive and adventurous kids, but they are invariably restrained by the others who are more cautious and will pull them back, she adds. Watching a young kid climb a tree often scares her, but the key is "for adults not to let their personal fears affect children who won't try out things if they feel they can't".
Within the city, fears revolve largely around traffic. "We are a select few parents who have the luxury of a driver to accompany our son," says Sandhya Ranjan about her son in sixth grade, adding, "but when he's transported we're worried about traffic — people just get knocked down and emergency and first aid is always a worry." She has recently moved back to India. She says: "Everything is sacred in India except human life. If there's an accident, people don't bother to stop and don't act quickly." She cites the regulations abroad as examples of how to make an environment safe for kids. There are timings for crossing outside the school and volunteers assist the children. If even a single car is passing by, it is stopped to allow the kids to cross safely.
Mala Kumar, who has two young kids, agrees that systemic changes could make a wider environment more childproof. "Institutions should take care," she says, pointing out that mock drills and sessions on how to handle emergencies could go a long way. She admits that it is only after reading about Anish's death that she has been jolted into thinking more deeply about safety, and says schools need to train kids.
Police Commissioner S. Mariswamy says Bangalore does have some special programmes for kids such as the Safe Route to School where kids are taught about traffic rules and regulations and even allowed to volunteer with traffic control. "We even toyed with the idea of shifting school timings," he says, "so that children wouldn't have to go in peak hours. But too many factors were involved with this." The police are now working with BATF to convince schools to allow vehicles dropping children to enter school compounds.
With recent events bringing child safety outdoors into focus, it's instinctive to go overboard protecting young kids. In the case of manmade dangers, such as kidnappings and sexual abuse, Usha Mukunda agrees she too would rather err on the side of caution rather than take any chance. "But we can't hold them back because of our fears," she says. We need to be frank when conveying information to kids, not in terms of a list of dangers, but more about fundamentals, she says. For instance, when warning kids about snakes, you need to help the kids understand the dangers of a snake outside its habitat, rather than dismissing it as an "enemy".
Studies show that children cannot really gauge distance or speed of oncoming traffic till they are 12 or 13 years old, and placing them in such situations is a recipe for disaster, however sensible you think your child is. There needs to be a gradual education in terms of protecting oneself, says Usha Mukunda. However careful parents are, there is always the random instance of a situation that could not be pre-empted. But kids do have a strong instinct for survival, and this combined with rational explanations of their immediate environment and its dangers, is the most that parents and care-givers can hope to offer their children by way of protection.
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