Stop, drop and roll is a simple fire safety technique taught to children, emergency services personnel and industrial workers as a component of health and safety training. Primarily, it is a method to extinguish a fire on a person's clothes or hair without, or in addition to, the use of conventional firefighting equipment. In addition to extinguishing the fire, stop, drop and roll is thought to be an effective psychological tool, providing those in a fire situation, particularly children, with a routine that can be focused on in order to avoid panic. The technique of stop, drop and roll works for the following reasons: Stop: Running adds oxygen to the fire, or it can be thought of as fanning the flames. Running does not allow for a "smothering" of the fire. It may also prevent bystanders, who may be willing to provide assistance, from smothering the fire with their jackets or other form of clothing, from dowsing the fire with water, or even using a fire extinguisher they might have available. Drop: By dropping to the prone position (face down) you immediately reduce your body surface area that can receive oxygen. In this position the person should immediately cover their face from the flames to prevent burn injury and the difficult disfiguring effects of burned skin. With the body against the ground, it smothers the fire, by reducing the oxygen that is available for the fire. Further, fire burns upward, and by dropping to the prone position, you retard the fire's ability to burn upward. Roll: Because a person's clothing (fuel source) circumferences their entire body, the roll portion of the technique ensures that all clothing that may be on fire is smothered (depriving it from oxygen) against the ground, and not just the front or abdominal surface of the body of the prone position. The person should continue "rolling" back and forth until the fire is fully extinguished. Although stop, drop, and roll is a useful technique, some people are skeptical about its true effectiveness. It's one thing to be so-called "book-smart" about the dos and don'ts of the stop, drop, and roll technique, but it's another thing to be able to actually perform the technique when your clothes are on fire. You're feeling the pain of the burn, and you enter panic mode. After all, we have all seen YouTube videos of adults catching fire, and then start running around and flapping their arms in the panic of their situation. With a real and present risk of a child being involved in some type of fire incident, how do we go about trying to teach young children to effectively perform the stop, drop, and roll technique? They may not even really understand what fire is or the danger it presents. They are likely to panic in fear if they catch fire, and their physical capabilities to extinguish themselves may be limited.