I don’t know why our responsibility for sun protection in primary school only goes to hats.
It needs to be like what happens with Crunch&Sip, which has been going for 20 years. They realised children weren’t getting enough vegetables, fruit and water. So they said, at whatever time it is in the day, they all have Crunch&Sip. And we, as parents, make sure our children have water bottles and other stuff. Obviously, that’s quite important. And I think it needs to be like that – a time set aside for applying sunscreen.
What I want is maybe three or five minutes every day, just before lunch, dedicated to everyone putting on sunscreen, so that it becomes habit-forming like brushing your teeth. Because that’s what I noticed in my own children.
My seven-year-old is getting to the point where he can put sunscreen on himself. My nine-year-old now, after about three years of supervised sunscreen application, just does it without me asking, and applies a reasonable amount. It’s like the habit of brushing your teeth, where you have to supervise them for the first three or four years, and the technique’s pretty bad to start with. But they know that brushing their teeth is important and eventually they do it without you having to check every single time.
So what I’m proposing is that schools stop at, say, 11.55am – across the nation – and then for three or five minutes everyone does sunscreen, so that it becomes habit-forming.
I’m trying to get a pilot up in a primary school, so people can see how it can be done. What I’m working towards is having one pilot school, and then surveying the parents and the school for their views on the project – which will hopefully demonstrate implementation was successful.
The key is trying to work out how we can do it in a way that doesn’t put a massive onus on the staff of the school. Teachers would just be supervising, though some are going to have to do it for the kiddies.
The next step is how do we get teenagers to do this? In some schools, they get dermatologists or plastic surgeons to come in and ‘show and tell’ horror stories. It will probably work for a couple of months. A plastic surgeon comes to the high school and talks about people having their ears cut off because of sunburn, and the students would be thinking, “Oh, yeah, I’d better wear sunscreen”. But then by the time summer comes again, and all their friends are at the beach trying to get tanned and wearing board shorts and bikinis, they will probably forget about that. Because they’re 17 and don’t think they’ll ever get old or get skin cancer.
I think the really hard thing for teenagers is trying to work out how to make putting on sunscreen and covering up “cool” in some way. Like sunscreen itself, covering up is not that cool. I think the only way you can do it is to start when they’re young in primary school where it’s habit-forming. I mean, if we suddenly started to get teenagers to try and brush their teeth, they’d likely say, “Oh, no thanks, that doesn’t sound like much fun”. Whereas if you’ve been doing it religiously since you were little… Teenagers are still brushing their teeth, presumably.
There’s also the option of bringing in a young person who’s suffered the consequences of not putting sunscreen on or not wearing a long-sleeved shirt. I think that’s a good idea.
