Infant & Child CPR

All milestones in your baby’s development are really exciting, but some can be a little scary if you stop to think about it. Your baby is exploring things with his mouth, so you scurry to write the new happening in his baby book. He starts eating finger foods, so you quickly pick up the phone to call your mother. He becomes mobile, so you get excited as to how much fun going to parks will be.

What about when your baby explores something really small with his mouth? What if the finger food gets stuck in his throat? What if he crawls over to the key bowl and takes out a glass pebble? As horrible as it is to think, your baby could choke. Are you ready to help him?

There are, of course, many other scenarios in which your baby could be in trouble. The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that 110 children under the age of five drown in bathtubs (or similar home items) each year. Infants are notorious for putting electrical wires in their mouths and for playing with exposed electrical outlets. If you found your child unconscious, do you know what to do?

Basic infant and child first aid training and CardioPulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) training could help you to save your baby’s life. Several organizations offer classes and all hours of all days of the week. The American Red Cross, the American Heart Association, the National Safety Council, and a host of local organizations are dedicated to keeping hours that allow as many people as possible to take their classes.

The classes typically take about half of a day and will teach you to recognize an emergency, care for a child who is choking, and care for cardiac emergencies. The child and infant classes apply to people ages 12 and younger; the infant-only classes (where offered) apply to people younger than the age of one; the child-only classes (where offered) apply to people between the ages of one and 12.

What is CPR?
CPR is a combination of rescue breathing and chest compressions. If a person stops breathing or circulating blood adequately, CPR can restore circulation of blood, which is full of oxygen, to the brain. Without that oxygen, permanent brain damage or death can occur in less than eight minutes. If you ever do need to perform CPR, using the correct technique will give the victim the best chance of recovery.

Why Infant & Child CPR?
Even if you know adult CPR, you should take a class to learn about the intricacies of caring for an infant or child in an emergency. For instance, when giving CPR to an infant, you do not want to provide a rescue breath with the same force you would when providing such care to an older person. Failure to use a gentler breath can result in damage to he infant’s fragile lungs and possibly even lead to fatal bleeding. Another major difference is that, in an adult emergency, classes advise a caregiver to call 9-1-1 immediately. In the case of a child emergency, classes advise that you give CPR for two minutes before calling 9-1-1 because the problem is typically due to an airway problem and trying to correct that problem takes precedent over calling for professional help.

Immediately providing CPR can double a person’s chance of survival. The National Safety Council estimates that 25 percent of emergency room visits could be avoided if people were trained in basic first aid and CPR. So, get yourself to a class and get certified. In the meantime, should an emergency occur with your child, call 9-1-1 and ask the dispatcher to give you instructions by phone until the ambulance arrives.