Growth and development of preschoolers

Experts on family safety have shared some reflections on school shootings to give us some guidelines to reduce violence both at school and in our whole society.

The most relevant point is not about controlling the guns.

Our society lives in a climate of fear, during these last years the most in the last five decades. But rest assure, school is still considered one of the safest places your children ever go, and tragic events such as shootings are very, very rare. In most societies they are unheard of. A child is much more likely to suffer from a hear attack than experiencing a shooting at school, and yet parents would never (correctly) would never give the minimum importance to such rare risk.

Also, statistics say that children are now safer in practically every category of hazard than in the 1960s , though it is something that you wouldn’t read in the news any day.

But there is one of such categories which has worsened drastically, and that is sadly, guns. In United States more than a million kids brought a gun to school during 2008. Even worse, gunshots are a significant percentage of the cause of death of American teenagers. During the 60s and around (when we parents were young) the main cause was by far car accidents.

The truth is: cars have got safer and guns have gotten much more dangerous. We should also considered that there has been an increase of 16.000 manufactured guns everyday, and each has a shelf-life of around four hundred years, that outlives by a lot any human being in history.

That is why many experts are addressing the subject as reduction of violence in the whole society rather than addressing only guns. This couldn’t be more correct since violence does not come only from a gun and even when other countries of our planet are not experiencing school shootings, they do have school violence. In Europe for instance, there are famous cases about students harassing their teachers.

These things look small when seen at home, but they can be decisive: how is your kid handling rejection at school? How is he facing his own parent’s authority? Having a look at these key points is certainly a first step into discovering if your children are adopting violence as a regular practice. It is not that they shouldn’t get access to guns, it is just that they should start managing violence early enough.

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