As an individual, a child will make many choices, and some very bad ones. However, it is important for parents to preempt choices of high risk and put the possible reward into perspective.
This is the classical "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?", question. In this case, a warning that while acting based on peer pressure feels good, it may result in terrible harm for a transitory feeling. A parent needs to express that equation to a child before the actual situation presents itself. Just to give them a chance to make the right decision.
However, this is more than just hypothetical instruction, it can also show a very practical lesson in the dangers of fire.
One such, given by an elementary school teacher, was to show how dangerous a fire can be by what *cannot* be seen, that is, toxic gases.
They first explained about carbon dioxide as representing any kind of invisible gas that cannot be breathed. Then they took a jar with a clean straw coming out of it, and added water and a few alka-seltzer. They asked a student volunteer to exhale, then inhale the out rush of CO2 from the straw, then describe what it was like.
He did so in surprised detail, and the teacher asked him how long he could have walked through a burning house after having inhaled something like that. He said he couldn't, at all.
It was a good lesson on how what you can't see can hurt you and a danger of fire. And this, the teacher pointed out, is just *one* of the dangers of fire.
Having been in the Navy, I know exactly what you mean about fire in closed spaces...
I definitely don't think kids get enough fire training.
Additionally, most kids just plain don't respect fire. I know I didn't until I burnt down an entire field...
By the way, I don't think this is at all a "friend jumped off a cliff" analogy.
My burning down a field is a "if your friend jumped off a cliff" situation.
Kids become attached to their animals just as powerfully, and often more so than adults do. This is an emotional action based on love I would guess, not an a classic risk anlaysis.
Often, when people do things like this, it may not even be a risked based thought process, just "something I have got to do".
Soldiers throwing themselves on grenades, pilots steering their crashing planes into uninhabited areas, people jumping into icy waters or, as in this case, running into burning buildings are not, in my opinion, based on classical logical components the way one might think.
If you analyze their actions, they are, for the most part, simply foolhardy or illogical.
I do see exactly the point you make, and agree on a level.
However, when you factor in the love a man feels for his wife or son, or a soldier feels for a buddy, or...a child for his dog or cat...they understand at some level, that there are things that mean more to themselves than life itself.
Such as love or responsibility.