How to talk to your children about fire safety
It’s important to have sensible and age-appropriate conversations with children to help them to understand the risks of fire, and what to do if there is a fire at home.
How to talk to children about smoke alarms
Children need to understand what it means when a smoke alarm sounds.
- Get your children involved in testing your smoke alarm and talk to them about what to do if the smoke alarm sounds.
- If you accidentally set off the alarm through cooking, talk calmly about what you are doing to silence the alarm. Explain that you know the alarm is telling you there is smoke from the cooking, but if the sound was from another reason for smoke, you would get out in case there was a fire.
Do children hear smoke alarms?
Research conducted in 2017 found that a smoke alarm would not wake the large majority of children. However, it is unlikely that a young child would be sleeping alone in a house, so an adult would hear the alarm and wake the child.
Children may be frightened by the sound of a smoke alarm – particularly if they have additional needs. We recommend that when you do your smoke alarm testing, you also practise your escape plan with your child. This will help them to get used to the sound and also stay calm and know exactly what to do. This is what happens in fire drills in schools.
Learn about smoke alarms
Watch this video with your children.
How to talk to your children about fire safety
Give children under five years old clear instructions of what they should and shouldn’t do. With older children, it’s better to also explain why.
You will probably need to talk about fire safety more than once, to make sure they have remembered and understood what you have taught them. Tell them:
- never to play with matches, lighters, or lighted candles and to tell a grown-up if they see matches or lighters lying around
- never to play, or leave toys close to a fire or heater
- not to pull on electric cables or fiddle with electrical appliances or sockets
- never to switch on the cooker or put anything on top of it
- never touch any saucepans on the cooker.
Explain that fire is not a toy and that it can hurt and cause damage.
A memorable rhyme for young children:
“matches, lighters, never touch, they can hurt you very much”
How to talk to your children about escape plans
It’s important that the children in your home know what to do in the event of a fire, but you need to take care of how to do this without frightening them.
When making the fire escape plan include the children; everyone in the house needs to know what to do.
- Practise and go through the fire escape plan together – practise in the dark too.
- Download our printable escape plan sheet (PDF) and go through this with the children.
- When talking to children refer to what they do at school in their fire drill – and apply that to your home situation.
In school, children will regularly practice what to when the fire alarm goes off. Though the first time they hear the fire alarm at school they may have been scared, with time and reassurance from their teachers, they realise the importance of knowing what to do and how to behave in an emergency situation.
Watch a video for children about escape plans and bedtime routines
Watch this video with your children.