Session 1 - Fire Safety Begins at Home: Defining and Rewarding Fire-Safe Behaviour

Excerpted from TAPP-C: Clinician’s Manual for Preventing and Treating Juvenile Fire Involvement.

Session at a glance

Background

Goals

Materials needed

Joint meeting with child and caregiver

• Describe the intervention program.

Child alone

• Begin to establish a therapeutic relationship with the child.
• Help the child to develop a solid understanding of the importance of learning fire-safe behaviours to replace fire-dangerous behaviours.
• Get the child on board to support caregiver rules about the use and storage of ignition materials.
• Plan a search of the home for ignition materials and/or accelerants.

Wrap-up and joint meeting with child and caregiver

• Discuss home practice.

Background

This session focuses on the importance of family fire safety and the efforts that the child can make to help.

In this session, the child will begin to learn about the importance of replacing his or her fire-dangerous behaviours with fire-safe behaviours. Initially, there will be a joint meeting with the caregiver and child to develop and clarify fire-safety goals for the family. This will set the stage for a “team approach” to fire safety.

Throughout the session, the child will learn and practise new skills to increase fire-safe practices in the home. For instance, he or she will learn the importance of appropriate rules for the use of matches and lighters and the central role of access prevention. The child will identify and practise various strategies to help the caregiver control ignition sources within the home. As well, the child will learn about the opportunity for family rewards for positive gains toward fire safety in the home.

The caregiver’s session closely parallels the child’s session and highlights the central role of the caregiver in promoting fire-safety practices within the home. Through the caregiver’s completion of the Family Safety Rules for Ignition Materials, and Home Fire-Safety Search worksheets*, the caregiver and the child will begin to work on developing and communicating explicit rules about the use of fire-starting materials for all members of the family. Child worksheets, which follow each session, can be used individually or put together to form a Fire-Safety Practice Book.

Goals

• Joint meeting: Discuss the main goals of the intervention and briefly describe the program to the child and caregiver.
• Begin to establish rapport with the child through the introductory exercises.
• Help the child to develop an understanding of why it is important to address fire involvement.
• Engage the child as a collaborator in home fire safety; get the child on board to support the caregiver’s efforts to establish control over ignition materials in the home.
• Help build skills on how to search the home for ignition sources and where to store ignition materials.
• Wrap up with a joint meeting with the child and caregiver to discuss the session, the home practice activities and the completion rewards.

If short of time:

Your main goals are to begin establishing a therapeutic alliance with the child and to get the child on board with the goal of increasing fire-safe behaviours and eliminating fire-dangerous behaviours.

Materials needed

• blank white paper
• pencils
• coloured markers or pencil crayons
• Session 1 practice worksheets*
• stickers or other incentives
• Session 1 progress note*

*worksheets and progress notes are included in the print version but are not available online

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