Kids Bounce

Since apparently fireworks don’t kill kids, I started wondering “What does?”

Once again, I put my tax dollars to good use, and found the website ChildStats.gov, which apparently intends to “offers easy access to statistics and reports on children and families, including: population and family characteristics, economic security, health, behavior and social environment, and education.”

The also offers stats on “child mortality.” Which is a rather grim thought, but since I don’t have any children of my own, I can maintain a certain distance from the issue.

Table HEALTH8.B gives the child mortality stats for kids age 5-14. This is the age range over which, in theory, parents are learning to “let go.” To let their children make mistakes and learn from them.

But some parents that I know are so paranoid about death and dismemberment, that they won’t let their ankle-biters out of the yard. Hell, anymore I wonder if some parents won’t even let their kids out of the house. The drive them to school, drive them to indoor play centers where the curtain-climbers are monitor at all times by trained professionals whilst they run around in a completely padded, rounded-corners environment.

So, to cut to the chase, what does kill kids in the U.S.?

The great irony here is that parents who shuttle their kids back and forth from one “safe” environment to another are actually putting their children at higher risk of dying than kids who stay home and climb trees. Based on the numbers it would seem that when a kid falls out of a tree, he or she bounces. But they don’t when they’re stuck in the middle of thousands of pounds of steel slamming together.

If you want to protect your children you should keep them out of cars, not the creek over in the woods.

Unfortunately, anymore for the kids to get to the woods, they have to walk down, or bicycle on, a road. Putting them in the way of cars. New housing developments don’t have sidewalks these days. The houses cost $400,000, but the developer can’t be bothered to splurge on sidewalks. Cause, Lord knows, a few yards of concrete and some wooden forms would blow their budget all to hell.

Though, presumably the real reason no one builds sidewalks anymore is because the people buying the house in the development don’t care. What do they need sidewalks for? No one walks anywhere. Including their kids.

In the U.S. I think we’ve taken the “children are precious” thing a little too far. We treat them like Fabergé Eggs, guarded at all times, and insulated from anything that might do the slightest harm. Instead of leaving them alone so they can be kids. “Self-guided study” it’s called, and it teaches all kinds of good lessons about where to find worms, how much a belly-flop hurts, and why you should never trust your older brother.

Finally, for a little perspective, here’s the same graph as above, but with the kids who didn’t die thrown in:

Relax all you parents out there. Kids bounce.