It seems the playground is full of bandages, casts and crutches lately. I’ve noticed lots of kids have broken bones this year. I wish I had been taking statistics as I’m not sure if I’ve just began to notice it, or if there is really an increased incidence of accidents. Is it just our school?
I’ve mentioned it to a few others, and they’ve seemed to brush it off as ‘footy season’, but there are netball injuries, playground injuries, careless silly mistake injuries, in amongst the usual football injuries. Are kids being pushed too hard physically or are they too soft?
I have no answers, just observations.
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6 responses so far ↓
1 Dorothy Stahlnecker (17 comments.) // May 21, 2008 at 2:19 pm
My grandson age 13..just had a dirt bike accident. He’ll be writing about it this weekend. Cast on his arm and leg. The helmet probably saved his life. What is going on?
Dorothy from grammology
remember to call gram
http://www.grammology.com
2 Joh // May 21, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Thank goodness your granson had his helmet on! It’s a worry when injuries occur.
3 Mr V (6 comments.) // May 24, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Aw, I just reckon kids will be kids. I’d rather seem them running around playing footy than not having the courage to go out and roll around in case they get hurt.
4 Joh // May 24, 2008 at 10:49 pm
I agrree with you in theory Mr V, but the mother in me comes out sometimes when I see so many kids struggling around on crutches and slowly rehabilitating. When I see dislocations with bones sticking out where they shouldn’t. Arms that have been in casts emerging after months, skinny, white and wasted. I just don’t remember there being so many injuries.
5 Liz // May 27, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I think we have made the world so safe now that the only way that children can get their thrills is by doing ever more dangerous things.
No longer is a child allowed to gain physical confidence by doing things like climbing the school roof to retrieve a lost ball (teachers themselves must now have a ‘ladder licence’ to so this - I kid you not). Instead of doing simple things like climbing trees or climbing challenging equipment on a council playground (are there any challenging playgrounds left I wonder?), they do things like down hill bike riding or somersaults on their skateboards. The mind boggles that what they will do when these things get banned!!
One of my sons has ended up in the emergency department four times from knocks to the head. Three times were from rugby and once from crashing his bike when jumping (2 weeks ago). Yesterday he set up a bike jump in our back yard and promptly went forehead first into a piece of wire suspended 2 metres high from the ground. He has an impressive scrape up his forehead. We have all been too polite to point out that that was a mind blowingly silly thing to do! However, older brother laughed outright and then they argued about that.
Children will be children and it does them no favours to wrap them in cotton wool. If they don’t take risks them one day they will take a big risk and, due to inexperience, they will not even be able to anticiate the consequences. Nothing like a couple of breaks or bruises to make a person question the adviseability of doing ever more dangerous things, or in the case of my younger son, to “Look up and live”.
Are there more accidents now? I don’t know. Perhaps there are, or perhaps we notice them more because we worry about them more instead of just treating them as part and parcel of life and not comment worthy.
Liz
6 Joh // May 27, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Liz, I agree kids today are over supervised and constantly under surveillance. I was OH&S rep at my school when the ‘no getting balls off the roof’ rules came in and my son was the first kid to break that rule!
Thanks for visiting.
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