Note: This is day 7 of National Preparedness Month. Follow this year’s campaign on Twitter by searching for the #NPM11 hash tag.
This month, as part of NPM11, I’ll be rerunning some edited and updated older preparedness essays, along with some new ones.
# 5819
As any Boy or Girl Scout will tell you, preparedness isn’t just for adults.
And the Federal government obviously agrees since they maintain a website called Ready Kids as part of the Ready.gov program.
Here you’ll find a fun, interactive way to introduce young kids to the concepts of preparedness. Something that should be part of every child’s early education.
As a former scout myself, I learned elementary first aid, map reading, woodcraft & survival skills, and a host of other valuable lessons before I was even a teenager.
And growing up as young boy aboard a boat on the west coast of Florida, I learned about weather hazards, including tropical storms and lightning, and learned the value of becoming an excellent swimmer.
During the Cuban Missile crisis, at the age of 8, I got the short course in radiation sickness, fallout shelters, `duck & cover’ drills, and emergency evacuations from my local elementary school. I recounted some of those experiences in a recent blog called NPM11: Creating A Family Communications Plan.
While I certainly don’t advocate that preparedness lessons be taught to kids today in such a stark and disturbing fashion - the Ready Kids site shows that the subject can be approached in a child-friendly non-threatening manner.
Later, while still in high school, I took Red Cross First Aid training at the local fire department. Shortly after graduation, in the summer of 1972, I took part in several rescues and helped to set up an emergency aid shelter at our local City Hall during Hurricane Agnes.
By October of that year, I was working on an ambulance and enrolled in the next available EMT class. Going full circle, a few years later as a Paramedic and a Red Cross CPR instructor, I taught hundreds of high school kids how to perform CPR.
One day, my partner and I rolled up on a heart attack scene, and found one of my students doing effective CPR on his grandfather . . . and yes, I’m happy to report his grandfather survived.
For my family, general preparedness was just considered common sense. Something to learn, and practice, and make into a lifelong habit.
And that attitude has served me well over the years.
In addition to the Ready Kids site above, FEMA has their own FEMA KIDS site, with loads of child-friendly preparedness resources.
If you have kids, or are just a kid at heart, take some time and check out these two resources.
