Nurturing Safety Culture at Home

The word “Home”, has a profound meaning, it’s just not a place where we live with our family, but a heaven where we are nurtured, nourished, loved, appreciated, guided, and corrected. It inculcates a sense of belongingness and teaches the basics of safety.

Teaching safety rules begins at Home. Physical safety rules are taught by parents, grandparents, relatives, neighbours, friends, and loved ones, from our childhood. Certain rules include, instructing a child to,

1. not play with fire
2. not to play in ponds/ pools unsupervised,
3. not to allow strangers enter the house
4. not to take goodies from outsiders, or
5. not respond to random inquiries from strangers,
6. not to leave the courtyard and so on.

At different stages of childhood, these rules change in order to accommodate the understanding and development of a child. There has to be very clear-cut guidelines and thorough reasoning from the kids, when they are not allowed to go out of the house or for playing with friends in the park or ride a bicycle in the colony and leave the house to have chats/juices in the neighbourhood. The children need to understand that these are opportunities provided to make them responsible adults, so that they makejudicious choices and learn to safeguard themselves.

In the COVID-19 era, our lives have changed. We are now more dependent on technology and gadgets for our day-to-day activities. Thus, physical safety barriers have been redefined. It is now important for the parents and elders in the family to be vigilant of their children and guide them of unsafe websites, educate children on cybercrime, cyber threats, phishing, cookies- the scary jargons which have invaded our lives.

The HSCP team in school is completely cued into all the changes in the new teaching learning scenario, has made modification to the online teaching to suit the changing times and conducts awareness programmes, provides safety tips every day. The information related to cyber safety is also shared by the school and the workshops organized by them have sensitized us. Although, these have invaded our communication spaces, we now know how to handle WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and other social media sites and applications.

Education and Awareness is the key to safety and rightly, it begins at home!!

Ms. Rani Pradeep, Parent of Pranavi, Diya & Niti, Tattva School, Bangalore.