Advancing Our Understanding of Mothers’ Safety Rules for School-age Children

Objective: Teaching safety rules is a common way parents attempt to moderate injury risk for elementary-school children, but few studies have examined the nature of this teaching. The present study explored whether mothers’ safety rules varied with type of injury (falls, poisoning, burns and cuts), the nature of these teaching strategies about rules, and how effective these rules were to moderate children’s risk behaviour when in a setting having ‘contrived’ hazards that were targeted by these rules.