What safety rules should I teach my child before leaving him with a babysitter?
Well, there are a variety of safety rules that you need to teach your children in general, depending on what age they are. You need to remember before that kids are invincible, and they don't like safety, they don't think the house is going to catch on fire, and they don't think they're going to get into a bicycle accident. So, you're talking to an audience that already doesn't think that they're going to ever get hurt. So you need to teach them some basic things. You need to make sure that they know how to contact you if they're of speaking age. You need to make sure that they know when to contact you, for instance, not every five minutes because the nanny doesn't want them to watch a TV show. They need to know what the difference is between a potentially dangerous situation and something that's not dangerous. So anything to do with home safety; fire prevention. Anything to do with medical safety; if the nanny were perhaps unconscious, it happens, or the babysitter. Sometimes adults lives are saved by children who know how to dial 911. You hear that in the news all the time. So I would make sure they know how to dial 911, and I would make sure that they know how to call other neighbors. I would put them through a little bit of basic home training about any type of medical emergency. And we have age appropriate information you can always get on our website about what to teach your kids. So if you go to csn.org you can download all the information that you would want to teach your kid before they're with a babysitter.
