Good ol’ days weren’t always the safest for kids

Published 9:00 pm Monday, November 14, 2005

In the days before seat belts, good parents would say, “Sit down while the car is moving” or “Sit in the back seat.”

“If I have to stop quickly for any reason,” they explained, “you won’t fly into the dashboard or through the windshield.”

They were doing what good parents always do, using the best available information. They didn’t know about seat belts, because cars didn’t have them.

People believed that infants were safe riding on a grown-up’s lap. They assumed that grown-ups holding small children could protect them from hitting something if there were a sudden stop or an accident.

When cars began to come with seat belts some argued for a while that seat belts increased danger. They feared that there was a greater chance riders could get trapped by a seat belt rather than protected by one.

But the truth is in. It is so much safer for children to wear seat belts that it is against the law for them not to. Good parents insist that their children have seat belts fastened in a moving car.

They also put small children in car seats designed for their size and age, and, for safety reasons, they don’t let young children sit in passenger seats where there are air bags. The owner’s manual for my car specifies children under 12.

We are even learning that a person riding without a fastened seat belt in a moving car is a greater danger to other people in the car. It is important to children’s safety that driver and all passengers wear a seat belt.

There are many things in which, like seatbelts, the safety information is so clear that good parenting requires different decisions and actions than a generation ago. Good parents require their children to wear bike helmets, for example. Head injuries don’t always happen in falls from bikes, but when they do happen they can be devastating. Parents have to measure risk to their children in terms of both frequency and severity.

The dangers of secondhand smoke have also become clear. Good parents not only do what they can to discourage their children from smoking, but also don’t smoke around their children in closed spaces.

In another area of children’s health and safety, studies show that putting infants to sleep on their backs is safer than putting them to sleep on their stomachs, because it reduces the occurrence of sudden infant death syndrome. It is not clear why that is so, but studies support it.

Clearly though, good parenting is more than having facts about seat belts and helmets, secondhand smoke and sleeping positions. Good parents must also act on the information.

To act on good information calls on some parents to reject the influences of their own family and childhood. Parents’ own parents or grandparents may continue to insist that “My children slept on their tummy and they all survived.” Parents may remember riding bikes without helmets when they were kids and assume there is no particular risk.

In fact, being a good parent, like being a good employee, often requires that people learn a task, unlearn and relearn it, and that they go through that cycle over and over.

Good parents often have to work with their children to teach them accurate safety information. Then they may have to insist that their children wear helmets and seat belts, at least in their parents’ presence.

They may have to lock up bikes or stop the car to get their children to wear helmets or belts. Many children and teenagers have no interest in taking safety precautions. They often think they are invulnerable, even sort of immortal.

Just how well teenagers have absorbed these safety lessons varies on the topic.

A study of local teenagers by the Snohomish Health District found that more than three-quarters of them always wear seat belts in cars, but less than a third always wear helmets while on their bikes.

Judging from Election Day one week ago, the public has fully learned that secondhand smoke is dangerous. This year, Washington passed the strongest law in the country to protect people from that particular danger. Perhaps in a couple of years it will be against the law to smoke in a car if there is a child present.

Good parents have to make decisions and take actions on issues that are less clear than these. Certainly, they act on those that have been proved.

Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked as director of clinical programs at Luther Child Center in Everett. You can send e-mail to bill@billfrance.com.