Educating parents to support children’s road safety: a review of the literature

Abstract

This narrative review synthesised the limited work that has been carried out into road safety education targeting parents. Parent education appeared to have a positive impact on child safety seat use and children's bike helmet use, but results regarding the impact of parent education on pedestrian safety were mixed. The review highlighted important gaps in the literature. A key gap being identifying effective ways to engage parents of low socioeconomic and ethnic minority backgrounds. Further, another gap is understanding effective ways to engage and support parents of children with additional needs to build their children's road safety skills. There is some evidence that parent education has a positive impact on these 'at-risk' groups, but little work on how to engage with these groups and the type of parent education required.

Meeting Young People’s Mobility and Transport Needs: Review and Prospect

“…Recent research in the Global North has drawn attention to the value of training parents about road safety [105] but in LMICs, where many children travel to school and other locations without parental accompaniment (see above), this is unlikely to have a significant impact. There, early training of children on pedestrian road safety is crucial.…”