First aid for parents

First aid is a set of skills that any parent should have. This course is designed for new parents of young children and presents, in order, an approach to dealing with almost any childhood medical emergency.

Sympathy. Provision of sympathy is your first recourse. Adopt a position in front of and slightly to the side of the injured person. Bend down to their level and, while patting the near shoulder, utter “There, there” in a concerned voice. For more advanced practitioners, you might consider expressing specific sympathy for the injury in question; “Ooh! You hit your head. That hurts, doesn’t it?” Avoid, if you can, stupid questions such as “Did you hit your head?” when the child has a lump like a grapefruit blossoming over one eye.

Kiss It better. Purse the lips together and apply to the affected area. Remember, however, to make sure that the affected area is not covered in blood or some other nasty childhood bodily fluid or is not, in fact, in close proximity to a source of any of those fluids. It’s important to remind the child of the efficacy of this placebo by following your kiss with the words, “There, all better now!”

Appeal to maturity. If you feel like a great deal of fuss is being made about nothing, or you just don’t really want to deal with the situation right at that moment, the next step is to stand up straight, chest out with a meaningful and mature look on your face and then say “Come on, big boys/girls don’t cry about things like that.” Of course, if your little darlings are regular watchers of soccer on TV, they’ll know that you’re lying and you might have to skip this step.

Plaster, Band-aid, whatever you call it. Nothing works like a Band-Aid. It not only stops bleeding and prevents the ingress of infection, it removes pain, wipes away tears and gives the injured the feeling of credibility that comes from having their injury taken seriously. A Band-aid, especially if it has a prominent picture on it in bright colours, can be worn with pride like a war wound.

Ice pack. An ice pack can serve the same purpose as a Band-aid. Particularly at school, there is a great deal of healing power in the attention you get walking around with a hospital-looking object clasped to your head. It helps if the injured party is being supported around the playground by a friend or too. This will cure everything up to and including a fractured skull – or at least make the complaint go away for a while.

Convince the child that the injury isn’t real – or that it isn’t as bad as they seem to think it is. “No honey, it’s not broken, you’ve just bruised it. A night of sleep is all you need.” Of course, you’re going to feel really stupid when she comes back from hospital the next night with a plaster cast and a crutch but we’re only interested in first aid here, you’re not expected to deal with serious stuff like that.

And none of this applies after 9pm. The only possible response to a childhood injury at that time of the night is a 5 hour wait in the emergency room stuck between a drunken bum with a nest of rats in his hair and breath that’s stripping the paint off the furniture, and a psychotic houso who’s wailing in an attempt to convince the doctors that the pain in her bruised foot is bad enough to require large doses of morphine and a private room.