For a child, the adult world is full of “dangers” and its innate curiosity, as well as the lack of notion of consequence, causes many “accidents” with children. This leads me to the definition of an accident: an unexpected and inevitable event that causes physical, emotional, or material harm.
That said, are all the “accidents” with children, real accidents?
The child who gets caught on a closing house door … is it an accident? The adult who shares the home with the child could not have that door protected or it lacked supervision?
Do not think that I am an apologist for children to live in bubbles and without any danger around, but if it is true that the child should be taught to protect himself when he is close to a possible danger, it is even more certain that it is up to the adult, to protect and avoid possible “accidents”. We should be always aware of all possible dangers to the eyes and the natural course of a child’s daily life, we must avoid the greatest or more easily accessible dangers to children and teach them to live together and protect themselves from all (including those we avoid, either by protection or by elimination). That is, we must always and first of all identify with the danger to the child and how to avoid it, then protect it, eliminate it or supervise the first contacts.
For example, I have a small glass top table in the living room (near the sofas). Even when my little ones did not talk (but they already crawled) when I began to show them the danger of the glass and how they should do before they got up (when they were crawling around the table). From an early age, they learned to look up first and/or put their hands over their heads before thinking of getting up and even identifying where the glass was. I did not protect or withdraw, but I taught them and supervised them all while they made their first “paths” around the room. I did not avoid all the hits, but there was never anyone more worthy of attention… And with each bump, we restarted the teachings. Without entering into the wrong transfer of responsibilities, like, starting with: “look what you did! Didn’t I tell you that you can’t do that!”.
Never forget that the responsibility lies with the ADULT! What we can/should do is (after calming/caring for the child), is go back to the beginning: “Look here! This is dangerous! You can hurt yourself! You must always do this” … Show him/her how, alert him/her and supervise next times!