Babyproofing
We were never avid babyproofers. Some outlets plugged up with plastic, sure. A token stairgate. When it was clear that a child could potentially slide right through the stairs of our weird floating staircase and land, not just on the ground floor, but because of a missing trap door, plunge all the way to the basement, I cut and screwed in some pieces of wood there. Hey! A design feature. Bicycle helmets? Naturally. But basically, we kept an eye on the children and let them bump their heads and slip and trip on things and fall off coffee tables because that’s how you learn.
Not just that, though. Too much babyproofing seemed to me to smack of a desire to wrap the little precious darlings in cotton wool and that’s not fair — not to the child, nor to the parents who have to redesign their whole space to accommodate the alien intruder in their midst. I mean, sure, we no longer leave whiskey bottles on the floor but nor did we buy kneepads for our young crawlers. Nor did we plonk special soft helmets on the heads of our Frankenstein walkers — arms out in front, maniacal expression of glee, not so much walking as falling forward relatively slowly. Let them fall. Then they can figure out how to get up.
But this (click to watch the video — and brace yourself) has me sitting painfully on my pointed parenting picket fence. Apparently, you can get five point harness car seats to fit children up to 80 lbs. Apparently, they are much safer than boosters with normal seat belts. The family who made this video lost their son, their booster seated, strapped-in son, in an accident when his seat belt failed.
I have spent a week twitching every time Helena (who is still in a five-point harness) asks to sit in Daniel’s booster seat. I twitch when Daniel is belted into his own seat. And I can’t tell if I am twitching with legitimate fear, or the kind of basic maternal twitchiness that needs to be squashed. You don’t yelp when you see your child trying to climb up some tall, twisty ladder at the playground. You just don’t. And you don’t make them wear a bullet-proof vest, even if you live in the big bad city. You let them bathe in the bathtub (a cause of more deaths than car accidents). You let your soft, scrapable, easily bruised and dented children out of your arms because it’d just be weird to be carrying around a twenty-five year old with kneepads and a squishy helmet. And we all spent our childhoods basically un-strapped in to the backs of cars without airbags, without childproof window locks or doors. But what if this is something basic, as basic as wearing a bike helmet? What if I am simply making sure, by getting the right car seat, that my child has a hat in cold weather? That he knows not to run out into the street? That he knows not to talk to strangers? What if this is a fundamental?
Where is the line between protection and over-protection?
I have to say, I’ve never quite gotten the booster seat. I understand why the child needs a different relationship to a normal adult-sized seatbelt, but the seats themselves seem a bit precarious. So I’d probably go for the larger five-point thingymabob, which will probably, in some not-too-distant future, be a feature you can have built in to a new car.
And yeah, can you believe how we used to travel as children?? Then again, there were many fewer cars on the road in those days, and none of them were tremendous SUVs that can roll over your puny car and not even notice.
My children are now 8 and 10. I really tried with all my might to be very protective when they were little. However, my laid back nature always won over the neurotic mommy role. When my son was 2, I awoke to him standing next to me with a tray containing coffee, toast and a glass of OJ. He always did have a fascination for the French Press Coffee Pot, but I never imagined he’d been paying attention to how I actually made it!! Don’t get me wrong, I was always careful with their safety but also wanted to foster their independence. Today, as they are a bit older they love that I let them try things over the years that other mommies probably would have cringed at.
By the way, good luck with NaNoWriMo. I too took on the challenge but it’s a bit slow going.
As tragic as the story of the boy and the booster seat is, I don’t see how the 5-point harness is the solution. It was the seatbelt that failed, not the seat. Most five-point harness seats are attached using that same seatbelt! And what if it had been a 14-year old in that seat? The seatbelt still would have failed.
When something tragic happens people want to do something. “Never again” is the refrain. But accidents are often just that — accidents. Nothing can prevent all random whims of fate.
Buckle your kids in, sure. Look both ways before pulling through an intersection. Avoid Roosevelt Boulevard. But I wouldn’t think that this anecdote exposes some fundamental danger to which we’ve become complacent.
I saw that video a few weeks ago, and when he outgrows his currnt 5 point seat, I am buying a Regent for Max.
He was running around at 9 months scaling bookshelves, so I did quite a bit of baby-proofing. It did not take him long to figure out how to remove all kinds of outlet cover though–even the ones that are a box over the cord and squeeze shut. He’s a maniac, and keeping him reasonably safe is a challenge.
I’m not a hover-mother though, in most situations. He does all kinds of crazy stunts at the playground, but I need to be able to take a pee or a quick shower at home without worrying that he might climb out a window or decided to taste Ajax.
I think I might have been more laidback if he were a calmer child. Some of the babyproofing stuff–like padded table covers–makes me laugh.
I agree that there can be too much overprotectivenss. However, if I had the ability to get a carseat that is known to be safer, I would, because of the huge amount of children injury or killed in car accidents every year. This is not overprotective – this is just knowledgeable parenting.
I don’t quite understand how the 5-point harness things work – because like mike said above – if it was the seatbelt that failed (and I’d like to know the name of that minivan in which it failed), then it seems nothing would have saved that little boy.
This is the horror of being a parent. The part you don’t get until you get it. The fact that any moment of any day, through a split-second of negligence or an unseeable accident – you can lose your child. And that knowledge/fear doesn’t go away. I just sent Zach (17) to NYC yesterday – he is auditioning at Tisch NYU today, and coming home tomorrow. His plane landed three hours later than originally scheduled, and I tried mighty hard to distract myself during that time. There was nothing I could do. The fact is, he could be 40, and I would still worry about him, and it would still break my heart if anything happened to him.
For my two cents – I support maternal twitchiness. If you have a twitch that doesn’t go away – I say, listen to it.
I’ve seen that video here and there in the ‘net and always thought “But a 5pt harness seat would likely not have saved that little boy” Why? Because the SEATBELT failed, not the booster seat.
Even the 5pt seats that go up to 85 lbs must be used with the seatbelt instead of LATCH once the child hits around 45lbs.
As for maternal hovering….I’m not a hover-er either. I think kids learn better by doing than by being told. You can tell them 50 times not to pinch their finger in the drawer, but if they do it once to themselves they’ll never forget. Obviously we make them wear helmets and they sit in carseats….but I let them do things other moms sometimes gasp at.
Wow–this is really a loaded issue for me. IN part because none of this safety gear is manufactured for small kids, so we had to turn Frances’s carseat around at 15 months (when she was 15 lbs and well under 30″) and risk what might happen in a car accident because by then she was mature enough to HATE being stuck my herself in the back seat looking backwards. And with laws being what they are, Frances will be in the forward-facing toddler seat until she is 8 years old and graduates straight to regular seat-belts. She just won’t be big enough for the booster seat by then.
So it’s difficult. I mean, even when she’s an adult, she will not be anywhere big enough to wear a seatbelt or sit in the front seat safely, and there’s just nothing we can do about that, short of forbidding her to ride in cars. It’s an extra risk we have no choice but to accept.
My natural impulse is not to be a hoverer. I let her fall and bump her head–I actively encourage her to try things b/c her impulse is to let us do everythign for her (she’s so not independently-minded). But I’ll tell you, sometimes that impulse goes to war with my completely irrational belief that she is at extra risk b/c of her size and the absolute lack of appropriately sized safety products and turns me into a crazy lady.
No parent should ever have to endure the loss of their child. Such a horrible thing.
Like previous commenters said, these things are often just freak accidents. If you can use the LATCH system, then you don’t have to worry about the seat belt failing. And like the video says, always use the tether as an extra precaution. But if you can’t use LATCH over 45 lbs, well, there goes that precaution. And there’s always something else that can go wrong. We have a Britax Decathlon (not all that fond of it, by the way), and the first one that was delivered was defective. The straps loosened all on their lonesome, without me pushing the button. I discovered this accidentally while practicing with my daughter in the house. Maybe I would have used it 10, 20, 100 times without noticing. Maybe we would have had an accident during that time. Maybe not.
That said, I try to take precautions when I can. My daughter is going on 16 months and is still rear-facing (even though she meets the official height/weight requirements for forward-facing). She doesn’t mind facing backwards, and it’s safer. So we’ll keep her that way as long as she’s comfortable and tolerating it.
But I’m certainly not a hoverer. My house is babyproofed in a way that makes things convenient for me (e.g., cupboards locked so I’m not constantly tripping over the contents). But I tend to trust my daughter to take care of herself and learn from her mistakes. She climbs furniture and wanders about unsupervised fairly frequently. I am always nearby and can hear her, but I don’t watch her every move. We ate out the other night and she wanted to play with a fork, so I gave her a fork. The waiter hovered about expressing his anxiety that she would hurt herself. I told him she was fine. He disappeared, then reappeared with a soup spoon, removed the fork from my daughter’s hands and replaced it with the spoon. I was annoyed, but not enough to make a scene. Thirty seconds later, my daughter pointed at another fork on the table, and I gave it to her.
You’ve got to find your own personal comfort zone.
Actually, if you go to Kyle Miller’s tribute website, you will read that after independant investigation by a neutral third party, the boy’s seat belt DID NOT fail…which the mother’s whole point. The booster seat and child slipped out from under the seat belt, and were launched outside of the car. The booster seat failed to protect the child adequately.
That being said, I think your commentary is completely correct. We never did much babyproofing to be perfectly honest…plug covers yes, dangerous chemicals put up yes, but I always had people commenting when I took my young children to their houses that they never got into any serious trouble. My answer was that we TAUGHT them that climbing on bookcases, not holding the hand rails, etc. were dangerous!!!! We need to teach our kids more in my opinion, rather than depend on “child proofing”, which in my opinion is never really child proof.
K.
so sad.
my kids are older now
(7 and 11) (with 7 being
almost the same size as 11)
but you still wonder
am i doing enough?
what else can i do?
i don’t have an answer.
I’m with you on this one – I’ve never considered myself to be overly protective when it comes to routine childhood bumps and bruises, but this story has tomrented me. A neighbor of mine sent me this video a week or so ago with great concern over the fact they had just moved their 4-year-old to a booster seat. She and her husband discussed it at great length and decided to keep her in the booster. The problem in this case wasn’t with the seat itself, it was with the seat belt, and that could happen no matter the child’s age and size.