The P Word

Bangungot

Ang Salumpuwit ni Aputiktik

Religious Fanatics

Fried in our own lard

Home safe home

M. L. Tan

A few weeks I was talking with Nympha, one of our office caretakers, when she suddenly screamed, "Naku!" and rushed out of the room. Both of us had heard two dull thuds coming from the second floor. I thought someone had dropped something. Nympha knew better. Her 9-month old son, Jason, who she had left on his walker, had managed to steer himself through the living room, out into the terrace, and down a flight of seven steps.

I’ll spare you the gory details and say that Jason’s fine now but the incident left me thinking about how we Filipinos may be lagging behind when it comes to child safety. Parenting and child-rearing are not instinctive, the demands changing with the times.

Nympha and her husband, who have three young children, work full-time. Nympha’s fortunate because as an office caretaker and clerk, she gets to live in the same place where she works. Our office is also child-friendly so Nympha’s children are able to come in and out of the working premises. Despite all these advantages, there are still times when Nympha’s children have to be left on their own.

Back in her hometown in Leyte, Nympha would have an entire extended family system to help with child care. Here in Manila, she has one young helper, almost a child herself. So the first lesson here is that if you must leave the child to someone’s care, make sure that person is mature enough to handle the responsibility.

Second, we should get rid of the idea that homes are the safest places for children. Out of respect for their privacy, I don’t usually go into my staff’s living premises but after Jason’s accident, I just had to check with the boy’s parents and suggest how they could make their place safer. We ended up listing simple but crucial tasks, such as putting up stair guards and other physical barriers to danger zones. These zones include places like the kitchen, where someone cooking could mean hot oil sputtering on the child.

Nympha’s place was fairly "child-proof" but I’ve seen many Filipino homes that are like war zones for children, for example, networks of electric wires and extension cords criss-crossing the homes and waiting to trip someone over. Many Filipino homes also do not have covers on their electric sockets, which could be dangerous for young and curious infants crawling on the floor.

Sometime back I talked with doctors from the Philippine General Hospital’s (PGH) Poison Control Center and they said a common problem in our homes are the medicines left hanging around. Some of these medicines, even something as plain as iron tablets, can kill children if taken in an overdose. Many homes are also careless with household chemicals, which are left lying around or are stored improperly. Kerosene, for example, is often kept in soft drink bottles, which is the way it’s sold in many sari-sari stores.

Ironically, some of the gadgets created to safeguard children may themselves pose new risks. We look at walkers as protective yet they can contribute to accidents, as it did with Jason. My brother-in-law, who is a Canadian physician specializing in rehabilitation injuries, wrote in when he found out about the accident and said that in north America, walkers aren’t advised for infants until they’re able to stand on their own and can exert some control over their movements.

Sometimes too, an improvement in living conditions can create new hazards for children. Before Nympha came to work with us, she was working in a factory in Cavite, and lived in small cramped quarters. Now her family has the run of an entire house with about 400 square meters of floor space, which is a healthier environment but which also means it’s harder to keep track of all the children.

Studies in other countries have also shown that as nutrition improves in a community, the number of child accidents increases for the simple reason that well-nourished kids become more active, malikot – said with exasperation -- in Tagalog. Jason is as malikot as malikot can be but this is because he’s very healthy, thanks in part to being breastfed all this time and to having a whole corps of doctors and nurses at the office giving health advice.

Filipino parents are often tempted to rein in their children after the kids have an accident, imposing all kinds of restrictions and limiting their movements. This can be counter-productive as well. Children also need to be left on their own at times, with reasonable safety precautions, so they learn to be self-sufficient.

We also tend to scold children after they’ve an accident. Still traumatized by the accident itself, the scolding could make the child reluctant in the future to come forward to talk about their accidents. If the accident was caused by his or her carelessness, this can be discussed after the child has been checked for injuries, comforted and assured that there was no major harm done.

Children need to understand, early in life, that it is all right to take risks, and that failures – in the form of a botched job, or a minor accident – are part of life. Allowing children to take risks also sharpens their ability to determine what they are capable of doing, and of learning to sense when the risks are too great. They’ll learn all this, coached initially by adults or older children, and later by performing the tasks themselves.

Jason? He shows no fear of the stairs. He’s still crawling through life but in a few weeks, he’ll be walking and shortly after, should be running about. On one hand, we’re all bracing ourselves for the new challenges, but, the stairs secured, we also look forward to more exciting times. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday, he goes into bungee jumping.