Color Me Safe – Coloring the Way to Young Children's Safety, From Cdc's Injury Center

Background:  Each year, an estimated 9.2 million babies, children, and teens are injured severely enough to need treatment in emergency departments. Most of their injuries are from motor vehicle crashes, falls, drowning, burns, poisoning, and suffocation. In 2010, the medical costs of injuries in the U.S. were about $81.6 billion.

Program background:  In 2011, in an effort to help young children empower themselves to prevent injuries in a fun way, CDC’s Injury Center created Color Me Safe (www.cdc.gov/injury/colormesafe). Color Me Safe is designed for children ages 4-7 and is available in both English and Spanish. It includes 12 pages of drawings showing the “Safe Family” taking steps to prevent injuries, like testing their smoke alarms and buckling kids into car seats. The book includes a rhyming story written at a second-grade reading level. On the last pages, kids have a space to draw their own “Safe” families, and parents are given a list of 20 proven injury prevention tips.  

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Color Me Safe was created to help adults have fun with children while teaching them lessons about staying safe. Seven families with children ages 4-7 helped inform the book's creative development. Parents in each household were given sample copies to review before completing an online survey about the concept, drawings, and story. Parental feedback was very positive and was used to refine the final version. For example, based on concerns about a scene of laundry detergent being put away that might motivate kids to climb and reach household chemicals, the image was replaced. Since fall of 2011, Color Me Safe has been promoted via various CDC channels, including a web feature story, Facebook, and Twitter—and most recently, Pinterest. Over 40,000 copies were requested within the first few weeks of promotion. Color Me Safe has seen sustained popularity. As of March 2013, it is the most often repinned item on CDC’s Pinterest board.  It has been featured in the National PTA magazine, Our Children, and has been promoted by the National Association of School Nurses. To date, over 70,000 copies have been requested and used by schools, businesses, community centers, trauma centers, hospitals, medical offices and individuals, including parents and grandparents. Color Me Safe has even been integrated into health and safety curriculum at accredited child care centers. Continued enthusiasm has resulted in CDC receiving more orders for books than we have been able to fulfill. Fortunately, free pdf versions are available at www.cdc.gov/injury/colormesafe in both English and Spanish, and web traffic to this page remains high and steady.

Conclusions:  Color Me Safe is a highly sought out CDC resource about injury prevention. It gives children a chance to be creative, listen to or read a short story, and learn positive messages.

Implications for research and/or practice:  With the current popularity of social media, games, and apps, Color Me Safe shows that hard-copy activity and story books still have an important place in young children’s lives and can serve as an important venue for injury prevention messages. CDC’s Injury Center is considering other ways to build upon the “Safe Family’s” experiences in other formats- for example, animating the “Safe Family” in online videos.