I usually think that husband D and I are about as safety-conscious as you can get. Then I read an article like this.
Helmets for sledding? We have mandatory 'wear-them-all-the-time-no-matter-what' helmets for biking. And riding scooters. And ice-skating lessons. And car seats galore.
But sledding? We live 2 minutes from a fabulous sledding hill. (The country club golf course has some good hills, amazingly enough.) Usually, when we go, it is just the four of us there and we fly down the hill, laughing all the way.
Carefree, frequent family sledding outings are one of the very few benefits to living in this arctic climate of ours.
Helmets for sledding? No thanks. Does that make me a bad parent?
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3 comments:
No, I don't think you're a bad parent.
This came up at Christmas in MN last year (2007)--there were a couple of really bad sledding accidents and the parents were all talking about getting the fish-eye for not putting helmets on their kids to sled.
I know it's gruesome to talk causes, but it seems like most of the accidents are caused by over-crowded, poorly-groomed hills. Can't we just fix that?
(Also, the great majority of sledding accidents are neck injuries, aren't they? How would a helmet change that?)
I'm 100% convinced that parenting changed in the 1980s and the underlying middle-class assumptions of today have almost nothing in common with the expectations of my 1970s childhood.
riding scooters??? really?
then again, i don't usually wear my helmet when i'm biking alone. shhhh, don't tell DFS ...
We live on the top of a big hill - they can ZOOM down, faster than cars....so yes, we make them wear helmets.
After spending 10+ years as an engineer in the bike industry, my husband makes us all wear helmets. He's seen too much brain damage!
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