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Parental perception of home safety, overall and by child age-group
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Abstract Background To slow the spread of COVID-19, many nonessential businesses, daycares, and schools closed, and areas imposed “stay-at-home” orders. Closures led to young children spending more time at home, traditionally, the place where more than one-half of unintentional pediatric injuries occur. The objective of the current study was to des...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... 75% (76.5%) of participants had no change in how safe they considered their homes to be before and during the SAH order. A total of 13.6% of participants viewed their homes as safer during the SAH order compared to before, whereas 9.9% of participants believed theirs home to be less safe during the SAH order compared to before (Table 2). ...Context 2
... total of 72.0% of participants with only young children while 87.8% of participants with only older children had no change in their parental perception of home safety from before to during the SAH order. Fifteen percent (15.3%) of participants who only had younger children and 6.8% of participants who only had older children considered their homes to be safer during the SAH order compared to before it (Table 2). ...Context 3
... was a significant relationship between the areas noticed to be unsafe in the home before and since the beginning of the SAH order (p < 0.0001). There was no difference by child age-group in areas participants noticed to be unsafe in the home from before to during the SAH order (p = 0.3048) ( Table 2). ...Citations
... Very little is known about how the quarantine orders affected parental home safety prevention awareness and practices. The only study in the international literature that compares the safety measures parents took before and during quarantine was published in December 2022 by Roberts K et al. [5]. In this study, parents believed that they had made a safe home environment, and there were minimal differences in safety measures or devices used before and during the lockdown period; however, they agreed that during the quarantine, they had the time to identify the areas of their house that needed to be safer, particularly for small children. ...
... This study is one of the few studies examining parental safety measures at home before and during the COVID-19 quarantine period [5]. Childhood domestic injuries are perceived as a leading international public health problem since they are one of the preventable causes of pediatric mortality and morbidity [6][7][8]. ...
... It is one of the two studies that describe the parents' safety practices during the pandemic, and the first one to do so in Greece. The other one is by Roberts et al. [5]. A multicentric study with different populations should highlight the level of safety at home more in depth, how to avoid child domestic accidents, and how prepared society is, so that in similar periods of confinement, home accidents can be limited. ...
(1) Background: Children are susceptible to home injuries. How prepared parents were to protect their children from accidents before and during the COVID-19 quarantine is uncertain. (2) Methods: We conducted a community-based, cross-sectional study in Greece between November and December 2021. We asked parents to complete an anonymous questionnaire voluntarily. Questions focused on accident-preventive measures taken at home during the COVID-19 quarantine. (3) Results: A greater proportion of parents took protective measures for a safer home before the lockdown than during the quarantine, while an interesting percentage of parents never utilized preventive measures for their children. Slightly more than half (58.6%) of parents did not seem to worry about a possible increase in domestic accidents during the quarantine. It was observed that those who had one or two children took more protective measures than those with more than two children. Older parents seemed to explain to their children how to access emergency services more often. Mothers stayed at home with the children more often, and their education affected the presence of some of the assessed measures. In our logistic regression modeling, parental concern about accidents was more related to the incidence of an accident during the pandemic and attendance at seminars. (4) Conclusions: Although the COVID-19 lockdowns disorganized family life, parents were aware of the importance of their parenting role in creating a safe environment for children, but according to the study, there is room for improvement.
