The primary aim of this research is to construct and test a comprehensive model of parental child rearing and safety ideologies and to investigate the relationship of these ideologies to the Safety Management Systems (SMS) of families. The concept of SMS is used to describe the entire set of factors existing at any one time within a family which help maintain the child’s safety in the home. The research is designed to yield a detailed description of the functioning of the SMS within a heterogeneous sample of 27 families with one, two and three-year-old children. Interviews and videotaped systematic room-by- room tours of the home are the primary methods. The primary means of recording, comparing and synthesizing data is mapping in the form of annotated floor plans and conceptual diagrams. For child rearing ideologies, seven types of families are identified on the basis of six ideological dimensions; Lax, Dictating, Irresolute, Differentiating, Undifferentiating and Impartial. Similarly, research revealed five key dimensions that help identify the safety ideologies of the families. These were; Child ascribing, Multi-agent ascribing, Enforcing, Reasoning and Verbal. Findings indicate that parental ideologies are one of the multiple factors that shape the overall SMS of families. Other key factors include the resources of the family, behavioral characteristics of the child, the effectiveness and appropriateness of the safely strategies used by the family and the degree of forces competing with safety within the SMS. For families whose SMS’s are guided by a strong ideological focus, “active” safety strategies which are Child rules and Supervision were more dominant than “passive” safety strategies which are Safety devices and Physical precautions. Families who have the ability to discuss child development and child safety within themselves and who use a balanced combination of active and passive strategies seemed to have more opportunities to prevent childhood injuries compared to single parents who depend on a single strategy. Research demonstrated the importance of developing safety intervention strategies that can reveal the gaps in each fam