Our small children suffer the most from fire.   And their home can be a dangerous place: for 2004, burn deaths (95%) and burn injuries (87%) involving children under the age of 15 happened in residential settings.   But that’s not the half of it: 50% of those burn deaths happened to children under the age of 5!  That same age group suffered 45% of the burn injuries as well.

Why such an adverse impact?  Here are a couple of reasons:

Mind & Body: Youngsters under the age of 5 don’t have the cognitive skills to recognize danger and the need to escape.  Small children also lack the physical ability to escape, even in their own home, when a fire presents a threat.

Body Again:  It doesn’t take much for injury or death to occur when small children are exposed to fire and its associated products of combustion like smoke and super-heated gases.  They have thinner skin than an adult so significant burning can happen quickly.  Their lungs are still somewhat immature so they are injured easily as well.  Lastly, when burn injuries do occur to a young child their immature immune system is not capable of fighting off germs and infection, a leading cause of burn deaths.

Curiosity:  Young children are inquisitive by nature—many parents will vouch for the fact that primary sensory organ for a toddler is their hands!—and they seek to touch and handle everything within their “zone”.  This tendency brings them in contact with matches, lighters, hot liquids,  hot stoves, portable heaters, and on and on.

So let’s all do a better job of helping our little ones overcome these obstacles to reaching their teenaged years—when the real fun starts for their parents!—by doing a couple of things:

• Have working smoke detectors in your home that children will respond to if a fire happens
• Exit Drills in the Home (E.D.I.T.H.)  Make sure that someone is responsible to ensuring that the little ones get out safely.
• Keep small hands out of contact with matches, lighters, heaters, stoves, etc.  Get down on your hands and knees and view your home—and the potential hazards for burn injuries—from their perspective!