codypuppy

I never had a helmet as a kid, although I was dropped in a childseat and was lucky I was not seriously injured.

I am a parent and require my 22 month old to wear his helmet in his trailer. He rides his push bike with his helmet. He rides a scooter at the sitter with a helmet-he also tries the ramp.

I grew up in Chicago and DID walk to school. When schools opened after the blizzard of 79' I did walk to/from school.

I also went skitching with friends (stupid and dangerious),roof jumped between garages for fun (equally dumb), Skied out of bounds from Alta Ski Area to Snowbird Resort (I also ski without poles).

I have done a few things in life, and to each his/her own...

MrBri

My six year old daughter just took a nasty spill down the side of a small mountain and was abruptly stopped by a rather large tree. She doesn't think bicycles are dangerous, trees are, and so are cars. If I was a "wussy, hand wringing adult", I never would let her ride on that steep of a path to begin with. The helmet is not paranoia, it's just using common sense. I can deal with her having bloody knees from a spill, but her long blonde hair being drenched in blood is nothing I care to ever see.

JeffS

I think you proved the point that helmets are more for the adults than the kids.

maddyfish

Riding a bike is not dangerous. Using a styrofoam hat is optional.

st0ut

you dont want to thats fine but kids may not have the cordination required to protect there head as they fall be cause they are LEARNING they fall ALOT becuase they are LEARNING. my kid got a new helmet this summer cause he bounced his head off the pavement doing inexcess of 20 mph down a hill.
when it's your turn to turn your kid into a vegetable have at it.

JeffS

I can't, because people like you have taken away that choice.

Noone wants someone else telling them how to live, but everyone's quick to try to dictate the lives of others.

rallykid

Most of the kids in my neighborhood wear helmets. Which is a good thing since they ride in the middle of the road, ride the wrong way on the street, pull out without checking for traffic, don't look where they are going and basically do everything wrong that someone can do on a bike. Apparently their parents think the helmet makes up for the lack of common sense and lack of proper riding instruction.

I usually see at least 2 or 3 and sometimes as many as 15 or 20 near car bike accidents in my neighborhood in any given day and have yet to see one instance of where the car driver would be at fault. The sad thing is that about half of these are kids riding with their parents.

MrBri

How's that?
You lost me there.

chipcom 

Thus proving his point.

chipcom 

I wonder how all of us survived as kids before helmets came into vogue?
Let's leave the fear card for Republican politicians, k?

MrBri

I don't see how this is such a complex concept for some people to grasp.

The fact is that:
* Kids can be less coordinated than adults.
* Kids are shorter than adults and, as a result, less likely to be seen by that massive Ford Excursion backing out of the driveway.
* Kids are less attentive than adults.
All of these factors lead to children being far more likely to become injured. Acute closed head injuries are nasty. If the risk of such an injury can be dramatically decreased by something as simple as wearing a helmet, why not have your child wear one?

I have seen it happen. I was stopped at a stop sign and watched a kid flying down a hill plow into a car because he had lost control. I had never seen so much blood in my life. I don’t think that if he was wearing a helmet that it would be “more for the adults than the kids”.

I can understand the whole "we don't need the gubment tellin us what to do with our yunguns" mentality. If you feel like it should not be regulated, that's your prerogative. However, to argue about whether or not helmets help keep kids from sustaining serious injuries seems ridiculous.

chipcom 

Yet you failed to answer my question. How did we all manage to survive? Indeed, is there some epidemic of kids getting killed in the other parts of the world, where cycling helmets are rarely used, that we are not aware of? If not, how are all those kids managing to survive?

Show me some data that shows the fatality rate among children as a whole is reduced by mandating that they wear bicycle helmets, otherwise you are arguing from emotion and fear...not facts.

Yes, a helmet provides better protection than no helmet...that is a no-***** item...but that no-***** item applies to just about any endeavor, including walking. The issue is whether there is a great risk of head injury to be protected from...and there is zero, zilch, nada, zippo data that kids are at any greater risk of head injury on their bikes than they are doing other things kids do, climbing trees, playing on roofs, etc.

So if you want your kid to wear a helmet...cool, you're the parent, you do what you think is right...but if you want to start mandating crap for others, you better have some good data that not only supports your solution, but supports the notion that a problem even exists that needs solving.

SHOW ME THE DATA!

MrBri

"If you feel like it should not be regulated, that's your prerogative."
By that I meant that I am not arguing for or against mandating helmet usage for anyone.

I know that if my kids are sitting in a restaurant eating pizza, they don't need a helmet.
There's no data out there to show you that kids are less likely to get a head injurt in that setting, but I use my best judgement as a parent.
If they are playing on the roof, they will be told to "get the hell off the roof". Once again, I am not saying your kids can't play on your roof if you don't mind.
If they are sharing a road with dumbasses who drive Yukons while texting their BFFs and putting on lipstick, they are going to wear a helmet.

You're right. It's my decision. We are pretty lax parents for the most part. I just see helmet usage as a no-brainer (har har har).

Do you wear a helmet?

st0ut

yep we are the parents. the question i have is are you?

stop telling parents that they are being overly protectyive by making our kids wear helmets. the examples you give do not relate to cycling at all.

playing on roof. Not going to happen.
climbing a tree. If the child CAN climb a tree they are big enough and strong enough to take the landing on SOIL.

going 25 MPH down hill on pavement. is easy for a kid my son can drop my wife any day of the week. Will he play more than he thinks yes ( that's why they are children and have ther choices limitied for them) and he will get hurt. and has. the differnce is that a skinned knee does not = a concusion or worse.
Look who is telling how how to live.

we have a bunch of people who do not have kids telling US how we should be as parents. LOL
Excuse me i have to drop some racing tips off at the Hincapie residence.

st0ut

While lots of people can post that thier crash the helmet did nothing to help them:

i fell hit my head only a bumd a helmet wouldnt have helped..


noone get to post.

Geee if i was wearing a helmet i wouldnt be in a coma or dead.

10 Wheels

Shut Up Enjoy Your Ride not thiers.

Bookman

I want my grandson to wear a helmet because common sense tells me that in an ordinary fall to the pavement a helmet could be the difference between a bad headache and a subdural hematoma. But that's been done to death on other threads. To the OP: You want other kids to wear helmets because it's the law, so make sure they see you wearing yours. Continue to set a good example.

phinney

Thankfully most of these ill conceived child helmet laws are ignored and unenforced. I've read of a child that hung herself to death when her helmet became snagged on a piece of playground equipment. Easy to imagine how this could happen. No debating the effectiveness of that helmet.

Of course nobody ever sold more product by paying an advertising agency to brainwash sheeple into buying their "no helmet".

diesel_dad

I am personally a little astounded reading discussions like this. I had a bicycle accident as a child with no helmet. A young kid cut in front of me while I was zooming along on my John Deere 10-speed. I went end-over-end and came to on the ground. I got up and felt that my shoulder was warm. It was soaked in blood from the back of my head.

I spent two hours in emerg. Got the back of my head shaved with no anesthetic. To this day, I have a big bump on my head from the scar tissue. So, I have lots of evidence of what happens with no helmet. If I'd had a helmet, I would have walked away.

We live in BC, where we have an all-age helmet law covering all areas and all people. My kids grew up using helmets and never complain about using them. They are so well accustomed that they show up at the dinner table wearing helmets and don't even notice.

People used to say that cigarettes were safe. They used to mix pesticides with their bare arms. Used to drive cars without a seatbelt lest they drive into a canal. But injury rates and increasing life expectancy have separate fact from fiction.

I hope no one loses their child thinking that helmets are unsafe because every day I have personal proof of what happens without a helmet.

chipcom 

No, I don't wear a helmet, didn't make my kids wear a helmet, and don't make my grand kids wear a helmet unless their mommy or daddy tells me they want them to wear a helmet (which they have not). Everyone has survived to date. My theory as to why everyone has survived, wacky as it sounds, is that riding a bicycle just doesn't have any higher risk of head injury as a great many other activities that kids engage in daily.

Do you let your kids play unsupervised...you know, messing around the neighborhood, climbing trees, building forts, playing in pick-up football, baseball, basketball, soccer, kill-the-carrier, dodgeball, etc. games, general roughhousing, swinging on swings, climbing monkey bars, sliding down sliding boards, running, jumping and all the variety of stuff we did as kids? If so, do you make them wear a helmet, since, if they are like we were, they are obviously engaging in activities that carry the same or greater risk of head injury as riding a bike? Or are your kids highly supervised and controlled couch potatoes, never allowed to do anything that carries any hint of a risk or to be out of sight for a single second, like so many seem to be these days?

The only difference between you and I is how we perceive the risk of riding a bike versus so many other activities...and that's cool, as long as we don't try to inflict our perceptions as mandates for others.

WillynHook

Sadly, not all of us did.

https://www.helmets.org/stats.htm

For your reading pleasure.

That is without question.


Dr. Joe

chipcom 

The data I asked for does not exist, on that site or anywhere else. Nice try though, if you think I am wrong please provide a direct link to the specific study.
BTW, ALL of US did survive...or we would not be here chatting in an internet forum.
I guess they didn't teach logic in medical school.

JeffS

I'm sure you don't care, because like most you're relying on your "common sense", but you might want to do some research on death and injury rates.

Personally, if I were trying to mitigate risk for my daughter I would start with the highest risks. I'd have to do a lot of mitigating before I got to bicycles. I'd end up tacking that one just about the time I was dealing with the risks associated with walking and WAY after I made sure she could swim.

Out of curiosity, I wonder how many parents insist on helmets, yet haven't taught them to swim? Who made the decision that bike helmets were more important than swim lesson? Some lobbyist group, and because it's a law people now believe it's some super-dangerous activity.

Hell, if we REALLY wanted to protect kids, we'd outlaw putting them in a car. We're only willing to protect kids when the solution is buying some product to do so. Funny how that works.


-------

My stance has never been that helmets are not effective to some extent. Rather, my position is that the risk you're mitigating is a minor one, and the method we've chosen is a fairly ineffective one.

chipcom 

Since I became a grandpa when I was only 42, I figured I would fix that for ya.

lesterdog

I encourage my kids to ride WITHOUT helmets. As adults, they will THRIVE and CONQUER amidst the mindless, petrified sheep.