On the Safe Side: Teach Your Child to be Safe, Strong, and Street-Smart, by Paula Statman. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1995. xxvi + 246 pages. $10.
Keeping our kids safe is an emotionally charged issue for most of us. Media stories about abduction and sexual abuse tend to increase our anxiety. After reading On the Safe Side I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Here at last was a book about safety which was practical and reassuring.
Paula Statman is a psychotherapist and family life educator with twenty years’s experience. She is nationally known as a lecturer and seminar leader and has trained hundred of parents, educators and child care providers to teach personal safety to children.
Any parent who has grappled with how to teach children caution without creating fear will find this book extremely useful. As a busy parent (as most of us are) I loved the idea of using spontaneous situations in daily life to teach and reinforce safety skills. The author even deals with the nitty gritty of what safety skills can be taught at various ages (preschool through grade school). The step-by-step, easy to teach methods Paula advocates inspire confidence that teaching our children needn’t be such a daunting task.
On the Safe Side is easy to read and understand. The positive, matter-of-fact tone in which the book is written helps you relax, put aside some of your own fears and absorb the information. Examples and real life incidents will help parents see how this approach can work for them. It makes most sense to read the book from cover to cover but it can also be used as a reference guide because it is laid out in clearly defined sections.