Sample essay on experience in open classes on children’s safety and first aid

Most people's understanding of child safety is "just call a doctor if something happens", but in fact 90% of accidental injuries to children can be avoided in advance. When an emergency occurs, the correct operation of the first rescuer is 100 times more important than the 10 minutes the ambulance arrives 10 minutes earlier.

The class was held by the Municipal Emergency Center in conjunction with the community. I was originally sending my baby to the calligraphy class next to it, so I joined in the fun on the way. I was still carrying the groceries I had just bought, and I caught up with the practical session as soon as I entered. The instructor was a female emergency doctor with short hair. She took a manikin about the size of a 3-year-old child and asked her father, who was sitting in the front row wearing a jersey, to demonstrate the Heimlich maneuver. The father laughed when he came up and said that he had watched many teaching videos and could do it with his eyes closed. However, when he hugged the simulator, he made a mistake: he put his hand on the shoulder and shook it, and patted the back as lightly as dust. Then he made a fist to find a position, either hitting the stomach area or pressing the ribs. After struggling for almost a minute, the "foreign object" (a small plastic ball) in the simulator's throat did not come out.

To be honest, I was still laughing secretly at the time, but suddenly I remembered the incident last year when my baby got stuck after eating jelly for half a second. At that time, I was so scared that I could only hold the baby and pat the back randomly. Fortunately, he coughed it out on his own. Now that I think about it, if the airway was completely blocked, my operation was not much different from that of the father just now, and it was useless.

I used to browse social media and saw people arguing about how to learn first aid for children: One group said that offline certification courses are required, and the fragmented knowledge online is all wrong, and it will not help if something goes wrong.； The other group says that ordinary people don't have so much time and energy to attend classes. They just need to memorize a few key points, but they won't be able to remember them if they learn something complicated. The teacher happened to talk about this in class that day, and said that both opinions are reasonable, and there is no need to argue about right or wrong - if you are a parent who takes care of your child every day, or a staff member of a kindergarten, it is indeed best to learn it systematically to avoid using wrong operating postures and causing secondary harm to the child. ； If you are an elder who occasionally helps take care of your baby, you really don’t need to memorize too many theories. Just remember three core points: for airway obstruction, pat the back 5 times before doing 5 abdominal thrusts; for burns and scalds, flush cold water for 15 minutes without smearing toothpaste and soy sauce; for accidental ingestion of poison, hit 120 without inducing vomiting. These are enough to deal with most common situations.

The aunt sitting next to me is a retired pediatric nurse. She came here as a volunteer teaching assistant. She secretly showed me a video on her mobile phone, which happened in their community last month: a grandmother took her grandson to eat fried peanuts. She said that many people now have a misunderstanding, thinking that "my children are very well-behaved and will not touch dangerous things." However, according to the data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 50,000 children die due to accidental injuries in our country every year, and more than half of them occur at home. They are all scenes that adults think are "impossible": falling from a window sill without a guardrail, touching a freshly boiled kettle, stuffing a button battery into the nose, swallowing magnetic beads. Which one was "intentionally done"? Something happened within a few seconds of not noticing.

I used to think that child safety was just a matter of installing a protective fence and putting away scissors and hot water. I also saw a case of accidentally swallowing magnetic beads in class that day. Two magnetic beads were attracted together through two layers of intestinal walls. Finally, the child had to undergo laparotomy to remove them. A few days ago, I put the magnetic beads that came with the stationery on the coffee table, and threw them away the first thing I did when I got home.

After class, I received a palm-sized pocket card with three simplified diagrams of first aid operations printed on the front, and the local children’s emergency hotline on the back. I stuffed it into the outermost layer of my bag, and also took a short video of the instructor’s operation to send to my family group. In the past, I always thought that this kind of open class was just a formality and was only given to kindergarten teachers. But now I realize that we ordinary people who stay with our children every day are the first line of safety for our children. To be honest, if we spend a few dozen minutes to learn these few moves, we might be able to use them one day.