negreirosJustina Nagato lived through a difficult situation while she was participating in a research study last year during her psychology course at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She was in a two-storey house, under renovation, in the district of Icaraí, in Niterói, the neighboring city to Rio, interviewing a woman about domestic accidents with children whilst the woman’s two children were going up and down a spiral staircase, without a railing or handrail. The children’s mother was calm, but Justina was worried: should she advise the mother that her children could break a bone or cut themselves falling from there? Only after she had finished the interview was it that Justina asked if it wasn’t a little dangerous for the children to be playing on the stairs. The other woman said that she had not thought before about the risks that her children were running, immediately interrupted their play and then thanked the interviewer for her alertness.
Justina and another seven psychology students visited 96 women throughout the metropolitan region of Rio. They showed them six sketches – of a bedroom, living room, bathroom, kitchen, stairway and backcourt – and asked the mothers what type of accident could occur in these spaces. The conclusions would perhaps raise the mothers’ hair. According to the work, published in the magazine Social Science & Medicine, mothers have difficulty in imagining that a child can cut himself or herself by picking up a knife, forgotten at the side of a table, or burn themselves on touching a hot iron. Three out of every five of the mothers interviewed identified the dangers presented in the illustrations, but only one in four gave solutions.
“Parents tend to believe that the dangers are outside of the home, not inside”, says Rodolfo de Castro Ribas Jr., a professor at the UFRJ’s Psychology Institute and one of the study’s authors. “Nevertheless, for a small child, the risks of house accidents are higher that those of confronting violence in the street.” Ribas says that neither he not his closest collaborators in this study – Alexander Tymchuk From the University of California in Los Angeles, the United States, and Adriana Ribas, from the Estácio de Sá University in Rio – had an idea of the dimension of the frequency and seriousness of domestic accidents. That was until the stories began to spring up. One of them came from a researcher at the UFRJ itself, who had to miss an exam because one of her children had burned himself at home with oil that had spilled from a frying pan.
Faced with the statistics, mothers would perhaps think twice before allowing their children to run such risks when they get close to the kitchen stove. Worldwide, domestic accidents account for 40% of the deaths of children aged 1 to 14 years. In Brazil, from 1997 until 2002 accidental injuries took the lives of 35,000 Brazilian children aged 1 to 14 years. Each year another 30,000 were victims of burns with liquid alcohol until the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) went on to only permit the sale of alcohol in gel form – then the accidents fell to half right from the following months.
Sometimes the damage can be extremely serious: 3% of the people interned with burns in Brazil die as a consequence of the lesions that the accident brings about on their organism. In the UK, it is also 3% of the total who pass through first-aid rooms that are children and who remain with a permanent physical incapacity. “There is no lack of epidemiological studies”, says Ribas, “but few are studying really why these accidents, which could be avoided, occur.”
Conscientious mothers
One hypothesis that the group intends to test in their next research projects is that the frequency or the gravity of cuts, falls and burns, in an area apparently so safe as the home, could be associated to the emotional maturity of mothers. “If the mothers believe that their role is important for their children,”, comments Ribas, “they tend to seek out more information and arrange their house in such a manner as to avoid accidents”. According to him, the mothers feel an intense social pressure for them to promote education and to guarantee the health and safety of their children, but generally do not receive support and have to learn to turn things around themselves.
Now they are not alone. This month Ribas and his team began again to circulate through Rio, this time meeting in schools with teachers and mothers. “We don’t want to generate stress or feed the guilty sentiment of mothers, but to draw attention as to how to manage the risks of accident in the home”, he said. In the nursery, for example, it is good to avoid pillows, principally those that are very soft, over which the baby can suffocate. And it is good to always leave the floor of the bedroom always free of toys and small objects that children can swallow. Much of the counseling is the same as that coming from mothers that their children call being neurotic: keeping cleaning products and medicines in safe places; maintaining matches, cutting objects in drawers or in high places and other heavy objects in low places; keeping the children out of the kitchen when cooking is going on; and in the bathroom never leaving children alone in the bathtub. As not all of the weight of the world falls on the shoulders of women, the researchers’ next step is to also interview the fathers. Added professor Ribas: “We’re very curious to know the behavior of men in relation to domestic dangers”.
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