15,000 parents take first-aid courses for young children, up from 9,000 in 2022

According to the Red Cross and childcare organizations, there is a rising demand for first-aid classes for parents of small children. Fifteen thousand parents took such courses last year, the Red Cross said, which is one of the largest providers in the Netherlands. In 2022, the number of parents who took the classes was 9,000.

“We hear very often that parents have been through something and didn’t know what to do,” a Red Cross spokesperson told NOS. “Or they heard from other parents who didn’t know either. That’s often the trigger for people to take a course at all.”

“We get a lot of questions about safety," Charlotte Hoogendoorn from Basker and BijdeHandjes told NOS. “Parents are really looking for practical guidance on how to act when accidents happen at home.” Due to the high demand, Hoogendoorn’s organization ended up offering 40 such courses this year after it had first planned to offer only 20.

One participant of such a course in Amsterdam told NOS that she is “already a company first-aider at work, so I know what to do in office emergencies. But with a baby it is a completely different story.” Another person told NOS about the time her 2-year-old daughter cried so hard she could not breathe. “I had never heard of that. It was a real shock, but after a minute it was simply over.”