earl,
The FIRST thing anyone needs to cover a home defense situation IMHO is a plan. Granted, it's an old military axiom that 'no plan suvives contact with the enemy intact,' but still that's no excuse for not having a home defense plan. Well, actually, more than one- more than a decade hanging around Special Forces soldiers taught me that you have a Plan A, a Plan B, and an 'OS' Plan at minimum for anything critical. Naturally you should have plans and preparations in place to cover any reasonable family emergency- fire drills, since fire in the home is a more likely emergency, or evacuation plans in case of bad weather if you're in a hurricane zone, etc.
It's my sincere opinion that the best place for kids when anything goes down that might require active defense is in a safe place with the armed parent between them and the threat. If that means having to move through part of the house to either gather or secure the little people, so be it. If that means the secure room is one of the kid's bedrooms and not the parent's, so be it. Plans and preparations are the name of the game. Plans require rehersal and practice.
Naturally, security starts as far away from the saferoom as you can push back the boundaries. The more warning you have that anyone is coming, and the more barriers there are for them to overcome, the more discouragements you can put in place (fences, motion activated lights, alarms, dogs, good solid doors, good locks, etc) between them and your loved ones, the more time you will have to put your plans in operation- AND the less likely you are to ever have to use your home defense plans.
Back when I used to work for Uncle Sam, the S-2 guys had an acronym they used- IPB, which stood for Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield. See
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/ioac/ipb.htm for some detail on the subject. Now this will certainly be more material than you will want to try to embrace in your home defense plan, and some of it simply won't apply- but it will give you some insight into some of the things you need to be looking at as you survey your home and grounds from the standpoint of the bad guys as you formulate your plans.
Or for a slightly different take on this, see Marc MacYoung's site at
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/pyramid.html . Consider the pyramid approach he outlines there- it's worth while also.
You mention training- and you no doubt know that training is something I particularly encourage, when it's relevant. I'd suggest you look at
http://www.nrahq.org/education/training/basictraining.asp and see if you can find an instructor near you who is teaching the NRA's Personal Protection In The Home class. If not, the class is available on video from the NRA's Bookstore at
http://materials.nrahq.org/go/product.aspx?productid=ES 26840 , and the textbook at
http://www.nrastore.com/nra/Product.aspx?productid=PB+01781 . Those are good starting points in your plans and preparations.
Any structure is a maze of what are known as 'fatal funnels'- narrow areas where anyone transiting is forced to go by structural features- such as hallways, doorways, stairways etc. Your house is no different. Your home defense plan needs to be set up to maximize your advantages in this regard, and minimize your disadvantages as a defender.
It's also possible to prepare these fatal funnels in advance to contain any misses or overpenetration from your weapon. Heavy furniture, bookshelves loaded full, decorative brick or stone interior walls, filing cabinets and all manner of things can serve this purpose. The same things can also serve to help you prepare genuine cover for your loved ones in their saferoom.
You will want to use lighting in the home to your advantage. Back in the day the motto of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, then known as Task Force 160 [
http://www.globalspecialoperations.com/soar.html ], was "Death waits in the dark." That is pretty much a description of what you will want to achieve. Your safe room and your position as defender should be in the dark, while the approaches to it should be lighted. You can use night lights, interior motion activated lights, remote control lighting (X-10 system, etc) that plug into existing outlets and use your home's existing wiring to accomplish this. There are night lights that have a power failure mode if you want to be prepared for those cases when intruders pull the power in preparation to making entry into the home, or you can have commercial type area power failure lighting installed.
You'll want to have reliable telephone communication from your safe room as well. With luck your spouse wll be there to call the cavalry while your cover the approach to the saferoom. In order for that to happen you'll want both landline and cell phone capability in place. It's been known that intruders ripped out phone lines before making entry, or simply take a downstairs phone extension off the hook to disable the landline. Having a cell phone helps make sure your ability to call for help won't be compromised.
Those are some things you will want to think about in planning and preparing your home defense plan. Not everything, of course, but some things at least. Hope it helps,
lpl