Knowing CPR and first aid is useful for virtually anyone. For a parent, it’s an even higher priority. Why? Well, because kids are reckless, and even when carefully tailed and monitored, they’re bound to make mistakes. The worst thing you can do is to avoid having a contingency plan out of the superstition that preparing for something bad will somehow “jinx” things and make them likelier to happen. You need to be ready. It’s far better to know how to perform CPR and never need it than to not know what to do when it happens. With that in mind and without further ado, here’s why parents need to undergo CPR and first aid training.
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Being Prepared at all Times
The truth is that you never know when you’ll need CPR and first aid skills. You see, these abilities are usually used in the most extreme of circumstances. This usually happens when you’re not prepared, when there’s no one else around, or when there’s no medical expert around. It’s a great life’s irony in combination with Murphy’s law. Still, by having a certificate and knowing how to administer CPR and apply first aid, you won’t depend on the circumstances. Instead, you’ll be ready to act.
It Only Takes a Couple of Hours to Learn
The most important thing about CPR and first aid training is the fact that it takes you a couple of hours to learn and earn a certificate. The cost of earning CPR and first aid certification is not that high either. In other words, sometimes it’s best to look at things from an opposite perspective. Instead of asking why you might want to ask why not. There are no reasons against it, whatsoever. These courses are quite informative and provide you with great learning materials. Moreover, they’re customized so that they let everyone learn at their own pace.
Wound Management
Kids get injured all the time. Even if it’s just a scratch or a bruise, it’s better if you know how to handle it. Disinfecting and dressing a wound, applying pressure and an ice pack to the injured area, etc. really don’t require you to be a medical expert. Still, having a certificate might give you an additional level of confidence in your abilities. Keep in mind that kids are great at reading emotions and they do it subconsciously. So, if you remain calm and seem like you know what you’re doing, they’ll stay calm in a scenario where they would otherwise panic. It’s that simple.
Greater Prevention
Knowing how first aid works also means being able to foresee more injuries than you previously could. This means that you can be more cautious and more effective at keeping your kids safe. If you have a pool in the backyard, installing a fence is your best move but even this won’t make it 100% safe. Therefore, it’s incredibly important that you know how to handle potential threats. Moreover, by knowing that no method of protection is ever 100% reliable, you’ll always be ready to spring into action. Being better at prevention is always the safest course of action.
Drowning is the Lead cause of Accidental Death for Young Children
The biggest concrete reason why you need CPR as a parent is due to the fact that drowning is the lead cause of death for children between the ages of 1 and 4. Even for older kids, ages 1 to 14, it’s the second most common cause of death. While this is the worst-case scenario, it’s something that you don’t want to even consider. For that reason, early intervention and knowing what to do could really save someone’s life. This is also a form of supporting treatment, which means that you’re buying time for medical experts to arrive.
Teaching your Kids to Step up
When accidents occur, everyone tends to move aside, hoping that someone else will step up. Stepping up in order to save someone’s life is the right thing to do and it also sets the right example for your kids. Remember, your kids observe everything you do and copy it later in life. They also use it to form their opinions of you, which can either result in them idolizing or resenting you (most commonly, however, it doesn’t go to these extremes). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how having this knowledge (and these certificates) would work out in these moments of crisis.
It helps in Real Life
The scenario in which CPR can save someone’s life is more common than you would want them to be. This increases the chance that you would have to apply it in real life. It doesn’t have to be your child. It could also be your partner, one of your kid’s playmates, or even a parent of a playmate. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter. When a life-or-death scenario occurs, you want to be prepared, regardless of who’s affected. When you take a look at heart disease and stroke statistics, the idea that you’ll find yourself in one of these scenarios really doesn’t seem that unlikely.
Not just Life
Being without oxygen for too long may result in permanent brain damage. This means a reduced lifestyle quality is imminent. As a parent, you want to prevent this at any cost. Previously, we talked about the cost and the time it takes for this to finish. Therefore, what you’re looking at is not just an opportunity to save their life but to give them a chance to have the best life possible. This is what being a parent is really all about.
In Conclusion
Knowing how to help doesn’t mean that you’ll have to. When it’s your child’s life in question, even a 1% higher chance is worth everything. Now, when you take into consideration just how easy it is to learn how to do proper CPR, as well as develop a couple of additional first aid skills, it becomes quite hard to justify not doing it. You’re a parent, which means that you need to be as responsible as possible.
