Personal safety

How you regulate yourself can keep you safe. Yet how others dysregulate you can make them unsafe to be around. The language that individuals use to talk with each other can carry a lot of weight of value to help keep someone calm or it can inflame a situation making it immediately dangerous. Having enough vocabulary to communicate for different emotional situations can be challenging, as the situation is requiring you to convey detailed and sequenced information whilst you need to regulate yourself and your interaction with others and with the environment at the same time. Families learn what features of the environment are unsafe as their kids get older. Emergencies where kids immediately drop to the ground and are at risk of harm or emergencies where kids immediately turn and run require families to plan ahead and perform detailed analysis of the places that they go and of the skills of the people with them to ensure that their kids are safe. When kids are little it is easier to pick them up to help them get out of dangerous situations where they’ve climbed up something that is too high e.g.  top of the fridge, but as they get older their height and weight and force of how they use their coordination to communicate their needs can make it unsafe for all involved. Yet there are situations that require the adults to support safety during challenging situations. Planning ahead supports reduced risks but this is not always possible and situations need to be worked out as they occur. In other situations, knowing in advance what triggers are likely to cause fleeing behaviours enables others to predict where these may occur and to put in place strategies to prevent or reduce their likelihood.