The Wrong Side of my Car
The blog that wants to go obsolete
Child raising BS: holding hands
Ashley Neal posted a video *1 containing a clip where a toddler rolls into the street, ahead of his parents. If this happens at the wrong time, that can easily end with a dead child.
So a question a few people asked was: why can’t those parents hold hands with the kids?
And the answer is it doesn’t matter, holding hands doesn’t prevent kids running off.
Have you ever walked with a toddler? Has he ever try to run off? It is possible to restrain a toddler by holding his hand. But you’ll have to squeeze hard. And I mean hard enough that it will properly hurt after a few minutes. So that is not how you normally hold hands.
Holding hands will guide your child, but it will not restrain them.
This begs a new question. Why are there people who do not know this? Almost everyone at least knows people who are currently raising children. Most adults have raised toddlers at some point in the past.
Maybe it is because walking with children is something many people just don’t do anymore.
Most travel with small children is done by car. And cars have these specialised seats which are really good at restraining children.
So, should young parents be able to walk with their children? Instead of merely bringing their children with things like cars or strollers? Should children have the right to exist outside the property lines of their parent’s home? If you want to answer yes to these questions, you have to accept that sometimes one of those children will, unexpectedly, run somewhere random.
Maybe holding hands will help — that is the guiding part in action. But it is not always practical — the kid in the video was on a balance bike. Or desirable, you will at some point want to let your child walk independently.
The thing you saw in that video will sometimes happen. If someone wants to do a walk with young kids, there is no meaningful way to avoid this.
If you drive past some children you had better be aware of this.
It is not even the first time he showed a close call involving toddlers. This short shows a close call involving parked cars. How fast do you drive past parked cars?
Ministry of Transport. (2015). 25 years of New Zealand travel: New Zealand household travel 1989–2014. Wellington: Ministry of Transport.
Note that babies and toddlers (0–4) also travel less in total than other age brackets, but even in absolute terms they spend less time walking. Cycling and public transport are near zero.
Ensuring everyone always travels inside a car was one of the ways we lowered traffic casualties over the past decades. Right now, some places record increasing cycling accidents despite cycling becoming less dangerous, due to rising cycling uptake.
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