8 Critical Things Every Child Should Know when Dealing with a First Responder and in an Emergency Situation

8 Critical Things Every Child Should Know when Dealing with a First Responder and in an Emergency Situation

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Lonnie Beck (00:01):
Cheers everybody Lonnie Beck here from dragon gym, along with the instructor, Chris coach, Chris professor, Chris, maybe we were just kinda talking about some things regarding children regarding emergencies accidents and things like that. And talking about like the things that kids should know. And then we started getting into the things that we should know as adults when emergencies happen. Right. Like I think I can't recall my mom and dad's cell phone number. You know, being able to give a description on where you are. I'll give you a for instance, I'll give you a quick story. About two weeks ago, I was in an an auto altercation in California and I couldn't pinpoint my location. I didn't know exactly where it was, but turn around and get my bearings. And it was really hard for highway patrol to locate me. So they actually ended up doing it by geotracking my phone, but if you don't have a phone there with you and you know, children in particular, how are they going to give police EMT, fire, or any other first responder details of what happened, where they are, who was involved in all that stuff? So these are like, how many did you say? Seven or eight things? Eight things that like, like kids should know probably us two adults, kids should know, like if something happens, like you want to share that experience.

Chris Taylor (01:28):
Yeah. So I met this family over the weekend and parents were not, not present because they were at work. And there was an injury in the household to the youngest member and the middle child. And, you know, the oldest kid was actually wrapped up in consoling, the little one, he was kind of holding them in and all this. And I'm the middle kid who was seven, seven years old, was able to provide these important details that we're able to kind of before the situation. So the, the young men knew his full name. He knew his little brother's full name. He knew his older brother's full name, which, you know, that's not a big stretch, but you never know. And then he knew his phone number. He knew his mom's cell phone number and his little brother's date of birth, his date of birth.

Chris Taylor (02:20):
He knew his address that they were at. And I think that goes back to what you were saying is like, you may be home or the, you know, something may happen at home, but you also need to know where you're at, right? If you're in a mall or a grocery store or something like that, you should, your little one should know where they're at at all times. And I do that with my son, my son who's seven, which honestly, I'm not certain, he knows all these. If we go somewhere and say, Hey, buddy, how did we get out of here? If there's a fire? And it just, you know, it seems like an obvious answer, but it keeps them thinking a little bit about those sorts of situations. But anyway, this young man knew his little brother, his little brother's age and weight and date of birth, which his way give me away.

Chris Taylor (03:01):
I mean, like, I don't even know half the people I know his weight, you know, so he knew his little brother's weight. And you know, the other thing is like it's kinda of a debatable thing. Every family is a little bit different, but when it comes to cell phone access for, for young kids, like some families are all about it. Some kids are, you know, some families are really against it. That kind of is up to you. But if they have responsible cell phone access access, can they, can they reach you? Like, is your, is your phone number programmed in there? Do they know your phone number off the top of the head off the top of their head? Can they, and do they understand what nine 11 is and how to access it? Which I presume that the older child actually called nine 11. I'm not really sure. And then another big thing, I think a lot of parents don't even really consider is like, can, can your child formulate a useful and, and coherent narrative about an event that,

Lonnie Beck (03:56):
So I think a kid's ability to do that comes back to how much practice they have and being in the moment, if you think about the way that kids are now, and like every generation before this generation has always, like our generation used to do it much better and different, the kids are not the same, which is true. But like, you'd be, think about what kids are doing now. Like very rarely, and even adults that already are paying attention, what's happening in front of us right now. Like you drive down the road and at stop signs and red lights, people were, are on their phone. So we all have this inability to articulate what happens because no one's paying attention. Right. Very few people are actually paying attention. So, you know, you were talking about the phone, I think like they make these cell phones now that don't have internet access that don't have social media access. I believe my sister has them for her boys. I think they're called like a GoPhone or go for phone. I'll post a link up on there, but it gives the kids to be like, you know, have mom and dad's information in there and you can text and nine 11 can geo locate it.

Chris Taylor (04:57):
That's what a big one, right there is, you know, geolocation, it's becoming very prevalent, but if you have no device, there's no geolocation available. Right. So you know, that, that big thing with the narrative, you may not think about it until it's, you know, important, but if you're not involved in this situation, maybe for whatever reason you're not present or you, or the person that's incapacitated that the ability for a younger person to explain to somebody that's helping the situation, what happened with enough detail, but not too much. And, you know, a nice, clear sequence of events is really, really important. I mean, there's certain things like if you know, a little kid consumed a poison or something like what color bottle did, right. The little person drink from her. Yeah. You know, there's a, there's a million examples.

Lonnie Beck (05:42):
He was, was it daddy swill? Or was it Fabuloso? Right. You know, you can be able to like figure out then what type of medical attention that that kid might need and all that stuff. It's huge.

Chris Taylor (05:52):
Yeah. Yeah. And then I think one of the most important things, and this goes any person of any age is the ability to stay calm under stress. And what blew me away about this little person, actually the entire family is that they were all very calm. You would think that if you see your little brother get hurt or injured, such a way that they're, they're not responding the way they normally do, you might lose control of your normal faculties, but this little person and his older brother were calm and cools cucumbers. And that really, really helped in it. You know, when you have a little person, they feed off how you respond. So if you start freaking out, they're going to mirror that.

Lonnie Beck (06:34):
Like how, how do you, I mean, how do you teach your kid? Like even adults freak out when something happens, right. You know, how do you teach a kid or an adult like that? When something happens, everyone knows that being calm is the best way to, to, to get, you know, you know, safe to get information or the people that need it to get help, whatever that might be. And there's a guy that I follow and he's, you know, he's a former Navy seal and he says, if you want to hurry up, slow down, slow everything down, slow the way you think, slow, the way you respond, because then, then everything's done deliberately. Like, is that training? Is that it, Nate? Is that what,

Chris Taylor (07:11):
That's a good question. I think at least in my experience, it kind of follows with that OODA loop thing where explain it real quick. It, what a loop is basically it's an acronym for observe, orient decide act. So every decision you make sometimes in the neighborhood of a quarter to full second timeframe you kind of observe yourself in your surroundings, you orient yourself in those surroundings, you decide on a course of action and then you act on it. And that's everything from tying your shoe to, you know, using a fire extinguisher and so on. So I think one of the things that happens is when people get kinda caught behind the, the chain of events, they, they tend to panic and panic. You know, there's really only a few things you do when you panic, you fight flight freeze or posture and freezing, I think is one of the more common, common responses to people that don't know what's going on in their situation. Yeah. So freezing is really bad. I never heard posture posture is, you know, like you're, you're, you're somewhere and somebody doesn't necessarily want to fight you. Oh, they don't necessarily see that a lot. Yeah. That's a, it's a fairly typical response. Is it fairly typical, a fear response? And you can see it in the way people answer you. Sometimes people get defensive. Yeah. Yeah.

Lonnie Beck (08:26):
Would you say that people, that posture really aren't

Chris Taylor (08:29):
What they're exuding most of the time that's fear. I mean, in my experience, I've seen it as 99% of the time. There are nothing even close to what they say they are. Yeah. However, it also could be one of those things where they could be overcompensating and really not wanting to get in tangled, you know? So they're really kind of overcompensating their prowess to minimize the likelihood of that happening.

Lonnie Beck (08:52):
But kids typically in, in where there might be trauma or injury or whatever, fire, like I, I think, and I've experienced, like kids tend to freeze in there and they're waiting for someone to sort of like manage your adult to come in and control the situation. But like a lot of this stuff I think comes down to, you know, a kid, a kid's ability to focus on what's happening in front of them, you know?

Chris Taylor (09:17):
Right. And basically you can get what I'm getting at is you can get rid of all of that sort of less than a lot of that, that likelihood if you just do it normally, you know, Hey the stove caught on fire and you put it out with a fire extinguisher and be like, all right, Billy, can you tell me what happened? And if they say, you know, they start losing their composure and start crying and all this stuff, like that's a bad situation when it comes to explaining narrative and S and keeping cool under stress. But if you can say, all right, you know, so what happened here? Well, I was trying to cook something and I had to Peter up to 10 and they called them fire. You know, maybe they're not supposed to be doing that, but at least they can explain what happened, you know, and you practicing that with them over and over again. And then when something happens, they don't get wrapped up in the sequence of events or that the potential, you know, they might be afraid they're gonna get in trouble or somebody hurt or something. They're not so wrapped up in that. They're answering the question,

Lonnie Beck (10:14):
You know, so went back to the eight again, like, what do you think? So, so let's say like, even adults, like we should know this. So like the beginning of this, I said like I'd have a hard time under pressure telling someone and I'm 40 years old. Yeah. Allegedly I think telling someone, my mom and dad's cell phone number, like, I don't, it's just stored in my phone. I don't, I don't know my mom and dad's cell phone number. I know my wife's, but like, is a kid gonna know yours is a kid gonna know the neighbors as a kid going to know anybody else that they, that they trust that can get them help. So,

Chris Taylor (10:47):
Yeah. I mean, it's conceivable that something had happened to your phone. Right. And you're not able to retrieve that information yet. And then you're out of luck. I think, I think it's important for adults to know social security numbers, like for yeah. Close like hospital. Right. You should probably, I don't know my kids' social security numbers, but I probably should wives, spouses, parents, it's a lot of numbers to remember, but that's probably a good place to start,

Lonnie Beck (11:10):
But I also can't tell you how many times I've texted my wife and I'm like, what's her social security number? What's the, like, I forget. Yeah. All right. So list of like eight things that we think kids should know in case of an injury.

Chris Taylor (11:22):
So there's eight things that I think would probably be the most critical for children to know, to help with situations first would be there, your full name, you know, not just mom and your daddy, but your first and last name your phone number, or however, they're best able to access you, whether it's work or home or cell or whatever, their date of birth and your date of birth, their home address and or their location. So if they're at home, obviously knowing your home address, if you're away may not necessarily be the answer unless they're trying to get back to home. So it'd be good to know their location and home address information about their siblings. So a lot of times older siblings are in charge or feel the need to be in charge of younger siblings. So if they're both separated and they don't know what their little siblings name is kind of ridiculous, but they don't know their birthday or something like that, that's not going to help. Next would be cell phone access and ability to use it again, that one would be kind of a family contingent one. That's up to you guys the ability to tell a narrative or explain what happened in useful terms. And then the last one would be, stay calm under duress. Okay.

Lonnie Beck (12:36):
The other thing with all of this is teaching your kids who is allowed to get that information from them, right? So now they have this vault of information, like, you know, all of the sensitive information, their date of birth, where they live, what their phone number is, where their mom and dad work, what their little brother's phone number is. And, you know, it's like, Hey, listen, you don't give this to just anybody. You know, if obviously if like nine one, one was called, you give it to the police officer, you give it to whatever first responder, because those people can be trusted with that information. Those are the ones that need that information. So that's almost like another topic of a, of a, of a video or something.

Chris Taylor (13:12):
Yeah. I mean, given, given the kid the ability to, or helping the child understand the ability to when and how to use this information is pivotal. I mean, it can be one of those situations where, you know, your child gets separated from you at the grocery store, and it's just a passer-by that finds them. And they say, well, what's your mommy's phone number. And they're able to give you the phone number and that person is able to call you and you guys can train each other. That's a legitimate use, but, you know, there's all kinds of illegitimate situations that could go on. So I think it really comes down to talking to these, these children in a way that they understand about, you know, pretty heavy, heavy things.

Lonnie Beck (13:51):
And I, I think like, you know, training the stuff at home, you know, teaching the kids like being delivered as a parent is something that's really tough to do because, you know, we're all working, the kids have stuff going on at school. And then it's like, when we get time together, it's like, all right, we're supposed to train this stuff too. Like I think so. Yeah. I think that's part of our role as a parent is to, you know, making sure that these kids understand all of this information, what they can do. I mean, think about what's at stake. You know, you think of always worst case scenario as a parent and plan for plan for it somehow. So training this stuff with your kids and making sure that they understand it, how they can give it to people, how they can get help. You know, the other thing is if you're at home and something happens to you and you're not able to, yeah, you can't get up, you can't call you can't, whatever that might be. Like your kid could be the one that helps you out of that predicament.

Chris Taylor (14:40):
Yeah. I mean, so many parents, you know, they, they do everything for their kids and, you know, the kids may be the ones that have to do it

Lonnie Beck (14:47):
For them. Yeah. So, cool. Well you know, if you guys have questions about this stuff or, you know, how we can help maybe you know, we do a lot of like info delivery with kids and training with kids and stuff like that. So hit us up. Thanks for watching guys. See you later.