Categorizing mothers' and fathers' conceptualizations of children's serious play-related injuries: "You won't grow a finger back".

BACKGROUND: There is inconsistency across child development and care literature in operationalizing serious play-related injury and also a lack of understanding of how mothers and fathers conceptualize serious play-related injury. The current study explores parents' perspectives of their 2- to 7-year-old children's serious play-related injuries in urban and rural areas of British Columbia and Québec, Canada, and provides an urban/rural and gender analysis of the results. METHODS: We conducted semistructured interviews with 41 mothers and 63 fathers from 57 families, a total of 104 participants, in urban and rural locations in British Columbia and Québec, Canada. We used a social constructionist approach to the research and reflexive thematic analysis to construct themes from participant responses and to inform the consequent categorizations of serious play-related injury. RESULTS: The results indicate four categories of parents' conceptualizations of serious play-related injury: (a) injury requiring medical intervention, (b) injury resulting in head trauma, (c) injury resulting in debilitation, and (d) broken bones. CONCLUSIONS: Child development and care advocates can use these categories to strengthen their communications with parents and to improve understanding of parents' conceptualizations of children's serious play-related injury.

Equity as the fourth 'E' in the '3 E's' approach to injury prevention.

The education, engineering and enforcement (3 E's) approach to injury prevention is grounded in assumptions that it is effective for everyone; however, evidence demonstrates that it fails to consider opportunities for all populations to experience safe and injury-free lives. In this way, the 3 E's approach does not support health equity in the injury prevention field. In this brief report, we argue that a fourth E, equity, must also be used with the 3 E's approach to injury prevention.

Safe Kids Week: Analysis of gender bias in a national child safety campaign, 1997-2016.

Background and Purpose Child safety campaigns play an important role in disseminating injury prevention information to families. A critical discourse analysis of gender bias in child safety campaign marketing materials can offer important insights into how families are represented and the potential influence that gender bias may have on uptake of injury prevention information. Methods Our approach was informed by poststructural feminist theory, and we used critical discourse analysis to identify discourses within the poster materials. We examined the national Safe Kids Canada Safe Kids Week campaign poster material spanning twenty years (1997-2016). Specifically, we analyzed the posters' typeface, colour, images, and language to identify gender bias in relation to discourses surrounding parenting, safety, and societal perceptions of gender. Results The findings show that there is gender bias present in the Safe Kids Week poster material. The posters represent gender as binary, mothers as primary caregivers, and showcase stereotypically masculine sporting equipment among boys and stereotypically feminine equipment among girls. Interestingly, we found that the colour and typeface of the text both challenge and perpetuate the feminization of safety. Discussion It is recommended that future child safety campaigns represent changing family dynamics, include representations of children with non-traditionally gendered sporting equipment, and avoid the representation of gender as binary. This analysis contributes to the discussion of the feminization of safety in injury prevention research and challenges the ways in which gender is represented in child safety campaigns.