WELLBEING KEEPING CHILDREN SAFE
A child’s perspective Small children view safety from a different perspective to adults. Harriet Bremner reports.
I Harriet Bremner and Poppy.
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magine your child is six years old and catches the local school bus every day. They are sponsored with high vis vests to wear while waiting by the road. A great initiative to help keep our children safe as they are more visible. But what if you heard that child say: “I can stand out on the road now and won’t get run over because I am wearing my high vis vest.” I heard this very thing once a few years back and remember thinking, wow, is this what health and safety has come to in our country? Now, don’t get me wrong, the vest is a great idea BUT the child did not really understand the purpose of it. Sure, it works to be more easily seen but it doesn’t make them instantly bombproof. At what point have we stopped teaching people to primarily make good decisions first, always? If you make a bad decision while wearing a brightly colored vest, you can still be badly hurt or killed. We want our children to grow up being adults who are able to think for themselves and make good decisions that will keep them and others around them safe, no matter what situation they find themselves in. As adults, it is our responsibility to engage in conversations with children about the ‘why’ so that they have a full understanding of what we are saying. Does it ever make you wonder why your children ask you ‘why’ all the time? The basic reasoning for this is because they need the ‘why’ to help them understand things in the environment around them. I believe children are going to be a gamechanger in the space of health, safety and wellbeing in our rural communities. First, they are not affected by the tainted brand that we, as adults, generally perceive health and safety to be. We think it’s just about
having that shiny paperwork folder and boom, we are compliant. We are wrong. So incredibly wrong and it is time that the behaviour towards this starts to change so that the culture in the future has a fighting chance. Children are the future, the future in ag, our future farmers and our future experts and probably of things we aren’t even aware of yet so let’s give them the best start in practical, hands on knowledge when it comes to farming and good decision making. Our take on the world and our perspective is different to a child’s both literally, in a physical sense and based on the life experiences that we have had compared to them. Take for instance, our view of the back of a vehicle…. As an adult we are able to physically see more and possibly be seen due to our size. A child, however, cannot be seen if they stand in that same place and this is where they get hurt. We might casually say to the child, ‘don’t stand there/here’. They may ask why and are told just don’t it’s not safe. Safer Farms and Gurt and Pops recently collaborated with NZ Young Farmers and Strath Taieri School in Middlemarch to run a practical farming health and safety day for the children plus two other schools who came along as well. The day was a roaring success and started off with the children doing first aid training in class for the morning with local Police. It is incredibly important that children know how to handle an emergency situation as they could be presented with this at any time in their lives. The other two schools then arrived, and all the children had a sausage sizzle. During the second part of the day, nearly 120 children were put into their groups with leaders from
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | December 2020
