Going Over the Top on Child Safety ; A New Report Shows the Need for Common Sense

from Record, The; Bergen County, N.J. ..

By COLLEEN DISKIN

I've always considered myself a safety-conscious mother. We baby- proofed the house, followed all the car seat rules and refused to allow the kids to ride anything with wheels without a helmet.

But a new report this week from Safe Kids USA has me wondering if in trying to teach parents about safety, we run the risk of stoking too much fear. The report, released as part of National Safe Kids Week, is filled with discomforting facts like these:

* An infant's spine is not fully developed in the first year of life, hence the need to keep a child in a rear-facing car seat.

* The thinner skin of infants and toddlers can burn at a lower temperature and in one-quarter of the time it takes an adult to receive a third-degree burn, making them at much higher risk of scald injuries.

* Adolescents between ages 10 and 14 have less-defined visual perception than older teens and lack the ability to recognize a specific object from within a crowded background, making it harder for them to judge the speed of an oncoming car at a busy intersection.

The non-profit safety organization decided to point out how a child's physical developmental stages influence safety recommendations in order to sway the many parents who are still too cavalier about safety measures or who think the tips are somehow over the top, said Chrissy Cianflone, director of program operations for Safe Kids USA. "We always give safety tips to parents, but we don't always give them the rationale on why they should be followed," Cianflone said.

The group also wanted more parents to be aware of lesser-known safety tips, like turning the water heater in a home down to 120 degrees, instead of 140 degrees, so that water from the tap won't burn fragile skin.

I can see why it's still important for safety organizations to preach to those not yet in the choir. But for those of us who are already converts, this new report might fall into the category of "too much information."

I don't know that it helps a new parent's confidence to think too long and hard about the fragile nature of the infant spine or a young child's skin. And I don't know that older mothers like me are going to find it any easier to start giving their adolescents some needed freedoms if we focus too much on the limits of their peripheral vision.

New York City author Lenore Skenazy thinks too many parents have become overly cautious. The "safety industrial complex," as Skenazy labels it, creates enough worry in some parents that it persuades them to buy products like kneepads for babies beginning to crawl and GPS devices to attach to middle-schoolers' coats or backpacks.

A year ago, Skenazy was labeled by some talk show hosts as "the worst mom in America" after she wrote an article for the now- defunct New York Sun detailing her decision to allow her 9-year-old son to find his way home alone on the subway after he begged her to allow him that freedom.

The article generated so much criticism, and so many talk show invitations, that Skenazy ended up establishing a Web site, freerangekids.com, and wrote a book of the same name that came out this month.

Skenazy believes we are emphasizing too many worst-case scenarios in our safety conversations and that parents are not letting kids develop enough self-confidence, either as toddlers learning to negotiate the playground or adolescents learning to explore their neighborhoods.

"Everything that used to be considered developmentally normal in a child is now looked at through a microscope," Skenazy said.

Many of parents' fears are also stoked by the marketing campaigns of companies selling safety products and by the 24-hour news coverage now given to child abductions, making them appear more common than they actually are.

I was a kid who walked herself to school from as young as kindergarten-age.

So it's a little baffling that I've evolved into a mom who was at first reluctant to let her fifth-grader walk to school, even though he'd be accompanied by friends, carrying a cellphone and traveling a route staffed by two crossing guards.

By the age of 10, I was deemed fully capable of keeping the potato pot from boiling over and putting the vegetables on to simmer at the appointed hour if my mother was busy with something else.

Recently, I asked my 10-year-old to take his own bagel out of the toaster oven after it had turned off, and he acted as if I had suggested he put his bare hand into an open flame: "What if I burn myself?"

That's when it occurred to me, not only have I not taught my older two kids about oven mitts and what they're used for, I also haven't done much to foster their independence, both in the kitchen and out in the world.

Safety-wise, very little seems to make sense when we compare the things we did in our childhoods to the things we allow -- or more accurately, don't allow -- our kids to do in their childhoods.

Safety advocates hear that gripe all the time from older generations: We didn't worry about that when we were kids, and we survived.

Cianflone is right to point out that death and injury rates among children have dropped 45 percent in the past 20 years in part because of all the work advocates have done to get parents to use car seats, buy helmets and take other precautions.

She agrees, though, that some parents have wrongly put the emphasis on teaching their kids to fear without teaching them how to keep themselves safe.

My kids needed to learn when they were young that a toaster gets hot and that their young skin could easily get burned. But now I guess it is time to also start showing them where I keep the oven mitts.

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