Presenter Profile
David C. Schwebel, PhD
Associate Vice President for Research Facilities and Infrastructure
Office of Research
UAB | The University of Alabama at Birmingham
schwebel@uab.edu
David C. Schwebel is University Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice President for Research Facilities and Infrastructure at University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he heads the UAB Youth Safety Lab. He earned his B.A. in psychology from Yale University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from University of Iowa. He completed a clinical psychology internship at University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Schwebel has published over 350 peer-reviewed manuscripts, most focusing on understanding and preventing unintentional injury in children. He has developed and implemented injury prevention techniques for pedestrian safety training in virtual reality environments, preschool playground safety via behavioral strategies targeting teachers, drowning prevention through lifeguard training at public swimming pools, dog bite prevention in rural China and the US, safer car seat installation through interactive merged reality, and kerosene safety in low-income South African neighborhoods. Dr. Schwebel is a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, a Fulbright Award winner, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He won the 2019 Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research from the American Psychological Association; served from 2017-2021 on the Board of Scientific Counselors, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control; and authored the popular book, Raising Kids Who Choose Safety: The TAMS Method for Child Accident Prevention. He has been Principal Investigator on grants worth over $12 million and his research has been funded by NIH, CDC, DOT, several other federal, non-profit and industry groups.
Presentations
Promoting Child Safety through a Popular Parenting Book
David C. Schwebel, PhD
Over those decades, we have developed dozens of programs to reduce unintentional child injury death. Many were highly successful and others less so. It is surprising, however, that no widely disseminated popular book guides parents on keeping children safe from injury.
A handful of related books are on the market. Some specifically target environmental change to protect infant/toddler safety (e.g., Reich’s Babyproofing Bible, 2007, Fair Winds). Others target safety sub-domains, such as firearms (e.g., Luciano’s Guns the Right Way, 2015, Gun Digest) or sports (e.g., Canut’s Concussions and our Kids, 2012, Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt). And, of course, broad child health books frequently include single injury prevention chapters.
Despite omnipresent smartphone use to seek parenting advice online, traditional parenting books still sell briskly. This abstract discusses the process of writing and publishing a popular book to help parents keep their children ages 0-12 safe from injury.
The book guides parents to implement household safety through the TAMS method (teach-act-model-shape), which is grounded in social learning theory and explains how to teach child safety, act through supervision and safeguarding, model safe behaviors, and shape children to make safe decisions as they grow. The book is sensitive to cultural differences and attentive to children’s development.
The ~2.5-year logistical process of writing the book, securing an agent and then publisher (Parenting Press), and refining text to achieve injury prevention goals as well as a fun, easy-to-read manuscript will be outlined.
2. Parents have capacity to enact change that protects their children’s safety.
3. Writing a popular book is a lengthy and complex process, but it can effectively deliver child injury prevention tools to a culturally diverse population of parents/caregivers.