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It is Road Safety Week 2021, the UK’s biggest annual road safety campaign, organised by the road safety charity Brake.
Every year, thousands of schools, organisations, and communities get involved in Road Safety Week to shout out for everyone’s right to make safe and healthy journeys every day.
In today’s blog, specialist personal injury solicitor Louise Gardner from our Swindon team, who is mum to a young child herself, calls for more road safety education on children’s TV.
As a mum to a very energetic toddler, I know the challenges that teaching our young people about road safety brings. Unfortunately, I also know only too well, the heartache and devastation caused when children are seriously injured or killed in road crashes.
Like many preschool children, my daughter loves the cartoon character ‘Hey Dugee’. If you are not familiar with ‘Hey Dugee’, he is a friendly, brown dog who is ‘leader of the squirrels’ and is responsible for organising their activities and making sure everyone is having fun.
I hope I am not alone when I say that, on some days, my child listens to ‘Hey Duggee’ more than she listens to me! However, I have not come across Duggee teaching the squirrels about road safety yet.
In my opinion, it would be fantastic if Duggee and other children’s TV programmes (like Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig) could, in the future, introduce some clear, simple road safety messages that toddlers and pre-schoolers could understand.
Teaching road safety to toddlers and pre-schoolers helps them learn to be more traffic aware and equips them with basic safety knowledge and practical life understanding of the rules of the road.
With Brake’s Road Safety Awareness Week running from 15 – 19 November 2021, now is a great time to educate our youngsters about the dangers of busy roads and the importance of road safety.
Here are five road safety tips aimed at very young children you may find useful:
- Hold hands with a grown up you know when you are walking outside where there are roads.
- If you need to cross the road, find a safe place to cross:
- Use a zebra, pelican or traffic light crossing
- Ask a police officer, lollipop man or lollipop woman, or a traffic warden for help
- If there is no crossing nearby, stop at a place where you can be seen along the road clearly and you can see all the traffic
- Stop, look (both ways) and listen for traffic – but remember some cars are now electric and don’t make much noise
- Do not cross until it is safe, and you have enough time in between traffic to get to the other side of the road
- Look and listen while you cross the road
- Walk straight across the road – not diagonally
- Do not run
If you would like to learn more about educating children about road safety, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA) has a very handy guide for parents of toddlers right up to teenagers.
If your child has been injured in a road traffic accident, contact our specialist solicitors today for a FREE, no-obligation chat. Call 0800 884 07777, email info@novumlaw.com or complete our online enquiry form.
