While most parents enjoy sending their kids back to school at the end of summer, they don’t enjoy dealing with the extra traffic and school buses on the road. When school is in session, safety on the roads becomes a little bit more important.

According to statistics gathered by Safe Kids Canada, the leading cause of children’s deaths in Canada is due to accidents involving a pedestrian and a car.

Each year, dozens of children are killed on the roadways in pedestrian accidents alone. Over 2,000 more children each year are very seriously injured in such accidents. Usually, these accidents take place while children are arriving or leaving school.

Here are some tips that can help keep your child safe: 

1. Teach your child to look both ways while crossing the street. A child should look to his left, his right, and then back to his left before crossing a street.
2. Children should not assume that a car will stop to allow them to cross the street, even if the child is in a cross walk.
3. Parents should walk with young children or at least have an older teen supervise the child. Safety experts recommend that children ages 10 years and younger should be supervised. Of course, each child is different. Some children may not be ready to cross the street by themselves until they are slightly older.
4. Parents should model correct behavior for their children. This includes driving cautiously in school zones and slowing down when approaching crosswalks. Children learn not only by listening, but also by observing their parents’ behavior. It is important to practice the safety tips that you are trying to teach your child.
5. Model good driving behavior for your child when you are behind the wheel. Even though your child may not be able to drive for quite a while, they will learn quite a bit by observing your behavior behind the wheel. In fact, studies show that parents who speed while driving are more likely to have children who speed when driving. Additional studies show that children who are in vehicles that are traveling at more than 50 kilometers per hour are more likely to experience a car accident or to be injured in an accident.
6. Minimize distractions while driving or while walking. Teach your children that it is not alright to text while walking or while driving. While it may seem like a small thing to check a message or dial a phone number while you are driving or walking, an accident can quickly happen. People who text while driving or while walking are more likely to be in accidents. Children who use headsets to listen to music while walking home should keep the music at a level where they can hear oncoming traffic.
7. Walk through scenarios for dealing with certain situations. For example, if a child drops a phone or an electronic device in the middle of the street, it might not be safe to take the time to pick up the item. In some cases, children who have stopped to retrieve items have been critically injured or killed. Children should keep walking unless it is absolutely safe to stop.