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.

KEYWORDS:

• Parent education
• road safety
• ethnicity
• deprivation
• children with SEND

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sarah E. O’Toole http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2129-7929

Nicola Christie http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7152-5240

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Road Safety Trust.