The effectiveness of parents in promoting the development of road crossing skills in young children.

BACKGROUND: Young children show poor judgment when asked to select a safe place to cross the road, frequently considering dangerous sites to be safe. Correspondingly, child pedestrian accidents are over-represented at such locations. Increasing the child's ability to recognise such dangers is a central challenge for road safety education. AIMS: Practical training methods have proved effective in improving such judgments but are labour-intensive, time-consuming and therefore difficult to implement on a realistic scale. The study examined the possibility that volunteers from the local community might be capable of using such methods to promote children's pedestrian competence. SAMPLE: Sixty children from the Primary 1 (Reception) classes of three Glasgow schools took part. Volunteers were ordinary parents from the same areas. None had 'formal' experience of working with children other than through being parents. METHOD: Volunteers received experience of training children at courses organised in each school. Children learned in small groups, receiving two sessions of roadside training followed by four on a table-top model. Pre- and post-tests allowed the effectiveness of training to be assessed. RESULTS: Significant improvements relative to controls were found in all children following training. Improvements proved robust and no deterioration was observed two months after the programme ended. Comparison with a previous study in which training was undertaken by highly qualified staff showed that the volunteers were as effective as 'expert' trainers. CONCLUSIONS: Parent volunteers can significantly increase the pedestrian competence of children as young as five years. They constitute a most valuable 'resource' in road safety education. The opportunities afforded by involving the local community in educational interventions should be further explored.

Errors in young children's decisions about traffic gaps: experiments with roadside simulations.

Young children's vulnerability as pedestrians has often been attributed to deficiencies in their decision making about vehicle approach times. Some studies have found a preponderance of risky decisions below the age of eight years. In contrast, studies using a closer simulation of road crossing, known as the pretend road, have found a preponderance of overcautious decisions in young children: traffic gaps of adequate size were frequently rejected (missed opportunities). However, the pretend road has potentially distorting characteristics which may account for this divergent pattern of findings. The experiments reported below show that new simulations that eradicate distortions nevertheless validate the pattern of results produced with the pretend road. Differences between adults and young children were pronounced for missed opportunities, but not for risky decisions. Subsidiary analyses suggest that the risky decisions of the youngest children may have arisen through lapses in attention, rather than deficits in timing. These findings run contrary to the view that attributes young children's pedestrian vulnerability to perceptuo-motor deficiency.

Children's perception of safety and danger on the road.

This study investigates the ability of children between 5 and 11 years to select safe places to cross the street. The children were presented with situations which were either extremely safe or manifestly dangerous and were asked to correctly identify these. In other cases, they were asked to choose for themselves routes across the road which they thought would be safe. The tasks were presented in various ways: by means of a table-top simulation on which traffic scenarios had been contrived; by means of photographs of road situations; and by taking the children to real-world sites in the streets near their schools. All the experiments showed a similar pattern of results. Five- and 7-year-olds exhibited very poor skill in identifying dangerous road-crossing sites. Their judgments relied exclusively on the visible presence of cars in the vicinity. Other factors such as blind summits, obscuring obstacles or complex junctions were never recognized as threatening situations. They also showed an unwillingness to make detours when planning their own routes, even where the direct route was manifestly dangerous. Nine-year-olds showed a higher level of ability and 11-year-olds showed quite good skill in these judgements. No sex differences were apparent. These results suggest that young children up to about 9 years must often be at considerable risk as they do not have the ability to recognize a location as dangerous, even if they know the mechanics of the Green Cross Code. The implications for road safety education are discussed.