parenting with purpose

. you only have about two minutes to get out of your house if it's on fire. only one in three households have developed a plan. joining me for tips on how to talk to your kids for exit drills is the community risk

specialist. thanks for coming in. sure. it's so important. oh my gosh, i feel like a broken record. i've been doing this for 12 years and people are like yeah, yeah, yeah because they don't

think it will happen to them. that's why everybody needs to do a fire escape plan tonight. all these kids planning to come out here. we have fire escape plans and smoke alarms. walking around with a big sign on your head.

check your smoke alarms. a lot of times, you don't check them until they're chirping at 3:00 in the morning. you want to change your batteries when you change your clocks and after 10 years you want to replace them. there's a ton of different

kinds. there's some electrical ones. having a working smoke alarm no matter what it cost is what you need. next tip, have an escape plan. yes, have a plan with your family.

sit down and talk to your you want a meeting place that they know two ways out of every room. like you said, fire spreads fast. two minutes. that's all you have. two minutes to get out and it's

the smoke. which leads to no two ways out of every room. that's important to. two ways out of every room. i harp on this as well. not only in your own home but where your children might go, you want to have plans for

wherever anyone is sleeping. that's good to know. not just in your house but everywhere you go. have a meeting place. it can be anywhere. my house, it's my neighbor's front yard because i know we can go and call 911 after we

get out of the house. for some folks, it might be the basketball goal. mail boxes are okay but you don't want to be in the street. when the firefighters get there, you can say okay, johnny is not here and they can go back inside and look rather

than he be in the backyard. these fires happen in the middle of the night when people are sleeping usually. practice, practice, practice. i've practiced with my kids. kids, you got to have the repetition with them and got to

keep having conversations with them. even if it's only a couple of you living in the house, knowing that you have a meeting place you want to make sure you do that. if there is smoke in your house, what do you do?

if it's smoky, we tell people to sleep with the doors closed. that's going to give you a little bit of extra protection. i know me as a mom too i have my doors open. if your door is closed you want to check with the back of your

hand. if there's smoke you want to get low and crawl over it. stay low and go. get out. get under that smoke. yeah, the next one, you said closed doors and once you're out, what do you do?

get out and stay out. this is a big thing with kids because kids start thinking i got to go back for my pet, my mom, i have to go back inside. if they go back inside they're at a greater risk of dying in the fire. when we go to schools we tell

the kids your job is to tell firefighters if anyone's inside. tell kids not to hide. here i am, my dad was a firefighter and i do this and we're like what do you do if you can't get out of your room and she says i guess i would

hide and she's six. i almost had a heart attack. it's going to make it hard for us to find them. if somebody wants more information, where can they go? they can always call me. i'm at the fire department. nfp.org has great stuff.

the more that you can practice with your kids, the better it's going to be. great.