PSA: Parents: Watch your young children and try to prevent accidents

[hornblower]

I was thinking about this a bit more & I wonder whether the issue is how well we can imagine being in a given situation. 

So - it seems there's this progression from total freak accident/nobody is to blame at one end..... and total negligence on the other end. 

And then there's the big grey zone in the middle. And the more we can imagine ourselves being in a given situation, the more we empathize with it & perhaps tend to excuse it. 

 

Of course we all sleep. But most of us make sure the room the child is in is safe, take whatever are culturally considered as 'reasonable' precautions and we sleep. 

But if you had a known flight risk child, who had developmental challenges and you know they can get in trouble, you would take additional precautions, bed alarms, door alarms, all kinds of steps. 

Things we don't really identify with we are more readily critical of. Many people will think 'who hasn't woken up from a nap and discovered the 2 yo quietly got up and was emptying the kitchen cabinets/getting into other trouble. Holy cow, we just got lucky." 

But other risks seem more extreme. Like maybe giving a toddler your purse to play with in the back seat of the car and forgetting to remove the bottle of pink colored pain killers from it. Or to remove the loaded handgun from it.  Is this freak accident, preventable but rare accident, or negligence?  I think people's opinions will vary. 


And what about medical accidents? If a nurse comes to give your spouse a medication in the hospital and gives them the wrong dose of the wrong medicine and your spouse dies - what do we call that & how should we respond?  Just be sorry and say what a terrible accident? 


I think the advancements we have made in preventing preventable accidents have been very significant and worthwhile. We learned from mistakes of others - whether they were errors in judgement or failures in design. I just think we should continue to learn from others. But we can't do that if we can't even acknowledge that a mistake was made & determine whether something was a preventable accident or not. 

 

[SKL]

You don't have to "acknowledge that a mistake was made" before you determine whether, given hindsight, there are ways to reduce the risk of a reoccurrance.

[SparklyUnicorn]

I was thinking about this a bit more & I wonder whether the issue is how well we can imagine being in a given situation. 

 

So - it seems there's this progression from total freak accident/nobody is to blame at one end..... and total negligence on the other end. 

 

And then there's the big grey zone in the middle. And the more we can imagine ourselves being in a given situation, the more we empathize with it & perhaps tend to excuse it. 

 

Of course we all sleep. But most of us make sure the room the child is in is safe, take whatever are culturally considered as 'reasonable' precautions and we sleep. 

 

But if you had a known flight risk child, who had developmental challenges and you know they can get in trouble, you would take additional precautions, bed alarms, door alarms, all kinds of steps. 

 

Things we don't really identify with we are more readily critical of. Many people will think 'who hasn't woken up from a nap and discovered the 2 yo quietly got up and was emptying the kitchen cabinets/getting into other trouble. Holy cow, we just got lucky." 

 

But other risks seem more extreme. Like maybe giving a toddler your purse to play with in the back seat of the car and forgetting to remove the bottle of pink colored pain killers from it. Or to remove the loaded handgun from it.  Is this freak accident, preventable but rare accident, or negligence?  I think people's opinions will vary. 

 

 

And what about medical accidents? If a nurse comes to give your spouse a medication in the hospital and gives them the wrong dose of the wrong medicine and your spouse dies - what do we call that & how should we respond?  Just be sorry and say what a terrible accident? 

 

 

I think the advancements we have made in preventing preventable accidents have been very significant and worthwhile. We learned from mistakes of others - whether they were errors in judgement or failures in design. I just think we should continue to learn from others. But we can't do that if we can't even acknowledge that a mistake was made & determine whether something was a preventable accident or not. 

 

 

 

 

Then again how do you know just how clever your child is?  I sometimes discovered my kid doing something that could have ended badly because I assumed he could not do such a thing.  And this was not a matter of me not paying attention or of me not child proofing.  I mean heck I used to glue padding on my coffee table because I was so worried about every little thing.  So as much effort as we can make, it's sometimes not 100% going to solve all problems.  I think the most difficult situations are being in unusual situations away from home.  My MIL would get mad at me for being what she considered paranoid when we'd visit Germany, but the thing is my kids weren't in many  of those situations normally so I felt like I had to watch out for them.  Stuff like not going and looking down into the hole where the train is coming.  How would they know better?  They were never in that situation.  She grew up around trains all her life.  Yet she was acting like I was being ridiculous.  As parents we can't win sometimes. 

 

And then with medical stuff.  Well sure that may be unintentional, but the main job of a nurse is paying attention to this stuff.  They are supposed to check multiple times with the medication stuff.  So yeah I would not be too understanding about that.  However, I don't think I'd automatically call it criminal either.

 

 

 

 

[Mergath]

I really don't get the big deal.  If the article helps remind you of something you've forgotten or didn't know, then read it and learn from it.  If not, then mentally toss it aside.  Lanny gives us lots of PSAs on travel, electronics and other things.  None of them have been news to me but they haven't offended me either. 

 

As far as blaming goes, Lanny (as far as I know) has not sent this article to the parents of the child who fell, nor has he blasted their behavior.  The accident was the catalyst for a reporter doing a PSA type of article.  Lanny read the article and thought that it was worth passing on.  The end. 

 

Most of us don't need a PSA reminding us not to let our children fall off buildings. If that should happen, it's a tragic accident, not something we didn't know in the first place.

 

And Lanny spends an awful lot of time around here mansplaining. It gets old.