Bicycle Helmets: Do Your Kids Wear Them?
Now that warmer days are here again, children in my neighborhood are whizzing around on their bikes, skateboards, and scooters. And as my 8-year-old son always worriedly points out, many are not wearing helmets.
According to a new national poll, half of children who live in communities where there are no helmet laws do not wear helmets while riding their bikes. But helmets, like seatbelts, are one of those must-have safety devices that really make a difference. Studies have shown that wearing a helmet while bike riding lowers the risk of death by more than 50 percent. And 40,000 head injuries and 50,000 injuries to the scalp and face each year would be prevented in kids ages 4 to 15 if they wore bicycle helmets, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Brain injuries, unlike, say, a broken arm, can have severe and lasting consequences. In a recent review of nearly 30 studies on brain injury, researchers at the University of California Los Angeles found that kids with moderate to severe brain trauma trailed behind their peers in certain types of brain function such as memory, verbal skills and problem solving even two or more years after the injury. The study also showed that younger children are particularly susceptible to lingering problems from brain injuries. Kids who were between 2 and 7 years old when they suffered the injury sometimes lagged behind peers in verbal skills years later, even when the injury was mild.
So make it a mandatory rule in your house that your child must wear his helmet if he wants to ride his bike, skates, or anything else on wheels. If you instill the habit as early as possible, it'll become a part of his life, hopefully far into the teen years and beyond.
How strict are you when it comes to making your kids wear helmets?
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Comments
I am very strict about my kids wearing them–and myself. It drives me crazy when I see parents biking with their kids, and the kids are wearing helmets but the parents aren’t.
I caught flak when I made my kids wear them on their tricycles, but I was trying to make the point that when you pedal, you wear a helmet–period.
If I could I’d make my kid wear it 24/7 — graceful she is not.
my kid has to wear a helmet when he rides his bike, scooter, or skateboard. period. he’s been grounded for forgetting – which hasn’t happened in ages. and the whole ‘johnny’s mom doesn’t make him wear a helmet’ argument? he’s not my kid, and if he were, he’d wear a helmet. not popular, but effective.
I require my boys to wear their helmets, No helmet no bike or what ever has wheels. The other kids are like I don’t have to wear a helmet, so I say when they fall off their bikes and crack their heads open don’t cry to me. How do you get other parents to put helmets on their kids? And I have to admit I don’t wear a helmet, I guess I should get one.
I never used a helmet when I was a kid. nobody did. And we all survived fine. Personally I think this helmet thing has gone too far. What’s next? Wearing helmets while driving?
That said. My kid do wear a helmet. But I would never force him to. He does it him self.
Here in Norway, helmets has become a popular accessory.
We never wore helmets on bikes or seatbelts in cars when I was a kid. Times, however, have changed. I am now just as strict on wearing helmets as I am with the seatbelts in cars. I don’t care if other kids don’t think it is cool to wear them. I’m a pediatric physical therapist who has seen what a brain injury can do – and I don’t want that to happen to my children, my husband, or myself. If soldiers can go for hours and hours wearing heavy kevlar helmets, then we shouldn’t complain about wearing a lightweight and much more comfortable helmet for the short time we are enjoying ourselves on a bike or skateboard.