FW: [NFLSE] Teaching Children to Play With Fire
Jenkins, JD (VDFP)
There have been many replies to this posting on EPARED, NFLSE and CRR net, I will try to pass a few along as I have the opportunity.
JD
From: NF...@yahoogroups.com [mailto:NF...@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2017 9:28 AM
To: EPARADE; NFLSE
Subject: [NFLSE] Teaching Children to Play With Fire
Teaching Children to Play With Fire
By SARA ZASKEFEB. 23, 2017 – NY Times
Credit Kain Karawahn
At a Berlin day care center, a little boy lights a match and touches it to another, making a sudden flare. The girl sitting next to him shouts a word that is the same in German and English: “Cool!”
The two children, both under 6, aren’t breaking any rules. They are taking part in a fire workshop designed by Kain Karawahn, an artist who, as part of a performance piece about freedom in 1987, once set a blaze at the Berlin Wall. No one was hurt.
Now Mr. Karawahn teaches young children how to set safe fires. “The success is not ‘Hooray, it’s burning!’” he said. “The success is that after my fire, the place looks the same as before, and I look the same as before.”
Mr. Karawahn’s workshops aim to prevent tragedies caused by children playing with fire in secret. Young children who make a fire alone often won’t tell adults for fear of punishment. Even worse, they sometimes hide after setting a fire and end up dying from smoke inhalation.
So Mr. Karawahn teaches children how to burn things properly — how to hold a match, use a lighter, light candles and build small bonfires. He lets them play with fire openly, under adult supervision, so they can indulge their curiosity and learn about fire without feeling the need to do so in secret.
Mr. Karawahn has trained nearly 2,000 educators in Germany in his method and earned the support of fire officials, insurance companies and safety organizations in that country. His approach stands in stark contrast to the “Learn Not to Burn” message promoted by the National Fire Protection Association in the United States, which urges children never to touch matches or lighters, let alone explore their use.
No formal studies have been done on Mr. Karawahn’s approach. Yet he has been teaching his workshops for more than a decade, without no reports of his fire-trained children setting structures on fire, he said.
The alternative strategy, the avoidance approach long used by the fire protection association in the United States, likewise has little evidence on its effectiveness. Most research on fires and children has focused on young people who have already been caught setting illicit fires.
The prohibition around children and fire is so ingrained in American culture that I, as an American, never thought to question its wisdom until I moved with my family to Berlin in 2009. There, my 7-year-old daughter returned home from school one day, excited to show us what she had learned. She struck a match, carefully pointing it away from her body, and lit a candle. Then, she waved the match out and watched the candle flame intently, her face glowing with pride.
Our fascination with fire runs deep. “It’s very clear we have been dependent on fire for a long, long time, and it has been integral to our evolution as a highly intelligent, information using species,” said Daniel Fessler, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Fire served as protection, warmth and a means to a higher quality diet, which may have allowed our pre-human ancestors to develop bigger brains, he says.
Natural selection may even have favored individuals who learned how to master fire early, he speculates. In other words, our children may come preprogrammed to play with fire, and if so, it’s an impulse extremely difficult to suppress.
This may be why, despite 40 years of prohibition, on average more than 49,000 fires reported to fire departments in the United States each year are caused by children playing with fire — with 43 percent of house fires caused by children under the age of 6, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
In Germany, the shift in thinking about fire safety is widely credited to Günter and Gryta Julga, a married couple in Hamburg. He was a fire chief and she was a teacher. In the 1980s, they combined their expertise to develop an educational program for school-age children that removed the prohibitions against fire. Many German fire departments now embrace the Julgas’ ideas.
“All the things you prohibit are interesting for young children, and the more you prohibit them, the more interesting they are,” said Frieder Kircher, a deputy assistant chief with the Berlin Fire Department.
Mr. Karawahn, the artist, has taken fire training to a new level, giving weeklong workshops to 5- and 6-year-olds in kindergartens and day care centers for over a decade. More recently, he has had these older children serve as “fire experts” to teach other children as young as 3.
“That’s a serious mistake,” said Paul Schwartzman, an American mental health counselor who’s worked with the fire protection association for 20 years. Children at age 3 or 4 “are just not developmentally able to handle that responsibility,” he said. “They don’t have the intellectual ability to understand what’s going to happen or how quickly it can get out of control.” Even supervised training for 6-year-olds sends the wrong message, Mr. Schwartzman believes, giving children false confidence that they can handle fires on their own.
In cultures where making fires is still central to cooking and everyday chores, children do learn to manage fire at a young age. Dr. Fessler found that in 19 societies, ranging from the Yanomami in Venezuela to the Kipsigis in Kenya, children start learning about fire as young as toddlers and master its use between 5 and 8. That’s not the case in most Western societies, where fire competency is delayed until adolescence or later. Mr. Schwartzman maintains that without the constant managed learning found in fire-using cultures, it’s dangerous to allow children to use fire.
As a family with two children who have lived in Germany and are now back in the United States, we were left with something of a disconnect. While my daughter had some fire training in Berlin, her younger brother, now 7, lacks formal classroom experience with fire. Ultimately, we chose the philosophy that views our child as capable rather than trying to stifle his innate curiosity.
“Would you like to light some candles?” I asked my son.
“Yes!” he said with surprising enthusiasm.
So I sat him down and showed him how to strike a match.
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Jenkins, JD (VDFP)
One of the responses to the original article
From: EPA...@yahoogroups.com [mailto:EPA...@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2017 12:51 PM
To: NF...@yahoogroups.com; EPARADE
Subject: [EPARADE] RE: [NFLSE] Teaching Children to Play With Fire
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This article is a bit startling. It is very unfortunate that Paul Schwartzman's experience in this field of work was not given more print. His points are well made but somewhat discounted in the context of the article.
Having worked in this field for many years, I'm in agreement with the points brought out by Paul. Children using fire is not about their physical capability, it's about the maturity and mental capacity to activate a dangerous tool and use it as it is designed and intended. To follow the theory presented in the article, it would seem appropriate to also empower young children to use power saws, sharp knives, and even self-medicate. In fact, weapons training for self defense might also be appropriate since evolution would also have deeply ingrained their fight or flight response so they certainly would need to hunt or defend themselves (yes, that was a joke).
Curriculums like "Learn Not To Burn" and any other well developed fire and life safety education tool are not about a prohibition of fire. They are about the understanding that fire and fire tools are exactly that, tools. Tools have specific uses and tools are for adults only (which is why it is equally important to apply the same reasoning to power saws, sharp knives, and medication).
The author the article makes a good point in that things that are made secret from children may become more enticing to many. Explaining the distinction between tools for adults and toys (or other household items that are allowable for children) are for kids is a reasonable topic and fairly understandable for most children. Hiding things from children does not educate and will certainly create an opportunity for heightened curiosity. There is a big difference between explaining why a dangerous tool is kept in a safe place and hiding something while a child is supposedly not looking.
The article fails to take into account children with learning challenges. The term "learning challenge" is not intended as a derogatory comment against any child. Rather, it speaks to the issue that not all children learn the same, or at the same developmental curve. What one child can begin to understand at age 6 may take another child until age 8. Some children have obvious learning delays or disabilities. Many have subtle aspects to their learning that may not even be recognized or appreciated by their own family. Talk to a first grade teacher about the learning variations in their classroom to gain a full appreciation for this.
Using age as a criteria for youth education can be very misleading. In the field of youth firesetting intervention, an understanding of child development and learning capability are important criteria to consider before any information is conveyed to a child. Failure to consider this can aggravate a child's existing or lack of understanding of fire. Improperly delivered education to a child with an existing misunderstanding about fire can increase the threat to themselves or others if fire finds its way into the child's hand.
It's no surprise the article has no evaluation to back up its theory. Sadly, the same must be said for many, if not most, legitimate intervention programs. I have personally heard many programs proclaim a 0% recidivism rate. When pressed for data about their findings, few, if any have ever done the follow up work necessary to confidently support the claim. When programs do the work to document recidivism, rates that are typically less than 10%. However, that means that 1 in 10 kids that complete an intervention program will continue to misuse fire. This is often driven by situations where lack of knowledge is not the only motivating factor in the child's firesetting.
On the topic of motivation, the article's theory is apparently based on the idea that children only misuse fire because they haven't been taught. The YFIRES national data system for youth firesetting intervention (YFIRES.com) shows that 21% of 516 cases submitted from 43 of 50 US states need referral to intervention services beyond fire safety education. While criteria for referral to additional services can vary, categorization of cases in this way generally indicates that education is not what the child lacks, that something else is motivating the firesetting behavior.
Attraction to fire is a human condition shared by most people. The use of fire, however, is learned (as is the misuse of fire). To think that human evolution has anything to do with a disposable lighter being found on the coffee table of a home, prompting a youth to use it, is quite a stretch. The human animal evolved as a species that needs parental support, guidance, and protection during the gradual process of physical and mental growth leading to adult independence. There are a wealth of physical and psychological indicators to support this. And perhaps the most important question to ask is, "why would a child age 3, 4 or 5 need to light a fire?" Are they a smoker? Are they lost in the woods and in need of warmth or need to capture/kill an animal and cook it? If this is the reasoning, there are far bigger problems with the supervision (not) being provided to that child.
I have personally investigated fires where children were not short of the capability to start a fire. In fact, most had been taught by their parents. The problem is, most parents were unaware that the example they set through their use of fire provided the lesson (and the modeled behavior) that was wrong for a child. It is important to remember that children aren't the only audience we need to consider when talking about youth firesetting behaviors.
Tragedy strikes when fire advances beyond a child's understanding or expectation. I have personally worked on thousands of youth firesetting interventions. A handful stick out in my mind because they are responsible for the loss of 16 lives. Of those lost lives, 12 were children under the age of 6. The other 4 were their parents, desperately trying to save a family member. This is consistent with a statistic reported by NFPA that says over 80% of those who die from child-set fires are children age 6 and under. How interesting to suggest that these are the very children that should be empowered to use fire...
As with most issues that carry life-altering consequences, the answers are not simple and should not be touted as if the entirety of the fire service, mental health community, child welfare, burn treatment centers, and all the other professionals who work hard to intervene when youth firesetting behaviors occur must have somehow just missed the obvious. New theories to provoke thought should be welcomed. But great care should be taken when any life hangs in the balance because of suggestions that may not be well thought out or have not included the expertise needed to understand the implications.
Don Porth YFIRES Executive Team
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David Chaplin, CFPS
Great article ! Thanks, JD.
I have been saying and telling people for at more than 15 years, that one day it dawned on me that children’s fascination with fire usually starts on their first birthday !
And you know who is usually responsible …… (gather the family, and yell Happy Birthday !)
Then, it is reinforced each year, at about the same time; slow, operant conditioning.
And of course, we tell them to “just say no” to fire and matches and lighters—“Tools, not Toys”.
When my two boys were still young and curious, I saw their fascination-- one more than the other. So, I taught them to use matches safely, how to build a campfire, how to stoke and feed a fire responsibly, and how to extinguish a fire completely. I also showed them how quickly a Christmas tree burns (outside) one year !
They are 21 and 23 years old now. So far, so good !
__________________________________
David Chaplin, CFPS
Integrated Fire & Life Safety Solutions, LLC
P O Box 828, Salem, VA 24153
Office/Fax: 540-375-9114 / 800-815-4749
http://www.iflss.net/BuyGuardianFireSystems.php
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodies ?” …… (Who watches the watchmen ?)
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From: vfls...@googlegroups.com [mailto:vfls...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jenkins, JD (VDFP)
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2017 10:02 AM
To: VFLS...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [vflsc411] FW: [NFLSE] Teaching Children to Play With Fire
There have been many replies to this posting on EPARED, NFLSE and CRR net, I will try to pass a few along as I have the opportunity.
JD
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2017 9:28 AM
To: EPARADE; NFLSE
Subject: [NFLSE] Teaching Children to Play With Fire
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