Are Your Grandchildren’s Parents Overprotective?

By Lenore Skenazy
Sept. 24, 2009

A popular columnist and author argues that parents go too far protecting kids from nonexistent dangers

Adapted from Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
In case you haven’t been keeping up, let’s take a look at some of the new products the Kiddie-Safety Industrial Complex is marketing to your grandchildren’s parents, starting with baby kneepads.

Yes, kneepads. Exactly what you’d want a 9-month-old to wear, if he were drafted to play pro hockey. Except that these pads — “The cushiest, comfiest kneepads ever,” according to the One Step Ahead catalog — are for crawling. “These medical-grade neoprene knee guards give little crawlers unparalleled protection, while slip-proof ‘traction beads’ guard against skidding.”

Skidding? Like a baby is going to go around the corner so fast, sparks will shoot out her Huggies? What kind of fools do they take parents for? Knees were made for crawling. And yet, look what one mom wrote on the One Step Ahead website, as a baby knee pads “product review”:

“Sometimes my daughter has problems going from carpeting to the wood and marble floors. It helps her with traction to keep from spinning out. Unfortunately, she did not like the feel on her legs and refused to wear them.”

Score one for the baby! But that mama — she really worries about her daughter “spinning out” while crawling. And other parents writing to the site are just as sold.

Extreme Toddling?

Photo courtesy of freerangekids.wordpress.com Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy

Another product seen advertised in parenting magazines lately is the Thudguard — a helmet to protect grandchildren engaged in that extreme sport known as toddling.

“It’s about time that someone has addressed the diffuse head injuries that are … on the rise for toddlers learning to walk,” wrote one doctor in an endorsement of the product.

Oh, really? “On the rise”? Are toddlers careening into walls and tables like never before? And are they really in danger of sustaining serious “head trauma,” as claims the ad for this $39 helmet?

Let’s ask the vice chairman of pediatrics at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Dr. F. Sessions Cole. His is one of the five largest children’s hospitals in the country. “We see 65,000 to 70,000 patients a year,” says Dr. Cole. “How many are associated with significant head trauma that resulted from instability as toddlers learned to walk?” he asks.

None.

Keep Your Eyes on the Backseat

At the Babies R Us near me, there’s an entire room devoted to child-safety devices: Legitimate stuff like cabinet locks and electrical outlet covers, but also a whole display of mirrors that allow you to watch your baby in the backseat as you drive. “Why do you need one of these?” I asked a dad reaching for one.

“To see if the baby’s okay,” he shrugged.

I suppose I knew he’d say that. But what we’re talking about here is a parent checking up, while driving, on a child who is already strapped snugly into a federally-approved car seat with a five-point belting system. It’s hard to imagine how the child would not be okay and besides, if he was fussy, you’d hear him. Then, at a stoplight, you could turn your head and look at him.

But now, with about ten different car mirrors to choose from, it starts to make good parents feel as if they should check on their car-seat baby more often while they’re driving — which is dangerous!

A Watched Baby Never Boils

Here’s one last safety product that parents don’t need, one that undermines their own good sense: The heat-sensitive bath mat.

This is a mat you put in the bottom of your tub. Turn the water on and if the words, “TOO HOT!” magically appear in a bubble near a duck’s head, you know that the water is, indeed, TOO HOT! Because who can trust their own senses anymore?

Oh, wait. We all can. Just dip a wrist in the water and you can tell if that water is warm, cold, or boiling hot. (Key word: Yeow!) So why do we have not only this bath mat, but also a competing tub turtle that will indicate, “TOO HOT” too? (Not a real turtle, who would indicate that by turning into soup.)

Why? For the same reason you can buy a blanket with a headboard built into it, in case you want to hold your baby but are worried about hurting his neck. Forget the fact you have an arm built for that job.

For the same reason you can buy a harness to hold up your kid while she learns to walk. Forget the fact you could hold her up yourself, or even let her fall. She’s got a bottom built for that job.

In fact, forget the fact that human children are pretty sturdy and parents are pretty competent. We have entered an era that says parents cannot trust themselves. They have to trust a product instead.
Elsewhere on grandparents.com, get a reminder of 6 things you got right as a parent,  find a surprising take on which baby products will really make your grandchildren brilliant, read columnist Adair Lara’s take on grandparenting then and now, and consider how much you are like your grandparents.

Source: Grandparents

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@youngchronicle.com