Do your DC wear bike helmets ?

[Tipsykisses]

My Ds has always worn a helmet , he's 7 now and rides really well so now rides to school with Dp (his dad) .

The bikes are kept in PIL garage a few doors down from us as we don't have room at our house , all our nieces & nephews are in and out regularly and ds helmet couldn't be found this morning .

I've told Dp he either needs to find the helmet or we need to buy a new one if Ds is going to continue to ride his bike but he thinks I'm over reacting & says that plenty of children ride without them .

Am I over reacting ?

it's not cut and dried for adults - but I think it is for kids who have little sense about speed and what damage they could do.

When they are adults they make their own decision. While they are kids they do as they are told.

No helmet, no bike. Right from SmartTrike stage to get used to the idea.

No helmet no bike - or scooter

Children and adults present totally different circs re helmets on s:

• children have much less 'road craft'.
• they are smaller and even less easy to see.

• they don't have the same co-ordinating abilities as an adult.
• they are just too precious to take stupid risks with.

I ride about 28 miles most days in heavy traffic. Wearing a helmet is non-negotiable. For me! I don;t really care what the stats say - no helmet is counter-intuitive. For skiing and horse-riding too.

Also, when as a car driver I see someone with a helmet, lights and bright clothes I know they are taking their own H&S very seriously, and I want to respect that.

We are a cycling family and would never ride without a helmet in the UK - and I got DH into a ski helmet by following the logic of why we wear cycle helmets. I had a bad crash about 3 months ago when my wheel slid on a drain and I was concussed for 6 weeks. If I hadn't had a properly-fitting helmet on I'd still be in a coma now.

We holiday in the Netherlands and none of us wear helmets there. We cycle in segregated lanes with lovely surfaces, cars and other road users are utterly considerate when you do intersect with the road (I watched DD2 aged 4 on a 14" inch bike stop an entire intersection to let her cross - my heart was in my mouth) and we cycle at slower pace as we are ambling locally to the shops etc.... In The Netherlands the only people to wear helmets are the roadies who are going fast and mingling in the traffic.

Grown-ups can weigh up their own risk (but I think they'd be mad not to wear one) but kids need the extra protection for the reasons above.

Research is not clear cut here

Helmet AND High Vis Waistcoats in Summer, high vis jackets in winter.
Even for the shortest ride in out quiet single track country lanes.

I have lived with the consequence of a child not wearing a helmet.

carol - appreciate that link. I'm still at some of the research though. I doubt heavily that drivers drive closer to helmet-wearers. They (generally) don't make those finer decisions at all.
And am very at the less sound thing. All the helmets I'm familiar with do not cover any, or even most, of your ears. If they do, change them.

It's right though - helmet or not isn't the most important safety factor. (driver education is that). But certainly for little ones it's an essential practice.

No helmets in this family. Cycling is statistically no more dangerous than walking, and you would like a right twat putting helmets on your kids to walk down the road.

Aga - the 'dangers' of cycling ARE over-reported undoubtedly. But to say walking is no more dangerous isn't something that stands up. People don't generally walk along a road, for instance.

And it's bollocks that better facilities/nicer car drivers in the Netherlands have any bearing on the fact that almost nobody (children included) wears a helmet. The best design case for a helmet is in fact on a nice Dutch-style segregated path, falling off at low speed. Being hit by a car on a British road is NOT the kind of thing they are designed for.

Helmets are an arbitrary (in the sense that they are no more 'essential' than helmets for car passengers, yet people have arbitrarily decided that they are essential) item of safety gear, which in aggregate massively reduce cycle safety given that they deter people from cycling in the first place.

The Dutch model where most people cycle regularly, with low-maintenance in normal clothes + no helmets, is much, much safer than the British one where you dress up like a Stormtrooper to battle the traffic, given that the health benefit of cycling (in terms of greater life expectancy as a result of improved heart function, etc.) far outweighs the risks of dying as a result of falling off or whatever.

"Aga - the 'dangers' of cycling ARE over-reported undoubtedly. But to say walking is no more dangerous isn't something that stands up. People don't generally walk along a road, for instance."

But they do cross them, they do get run down by cars on the pavement, etc.

The fatality rate per 100 million km walked is around 6.6, and per 100 million km cycled 4.8. So it less likely that a cyclist engaging in a given journey will die than a pedestrian.

See, I would still doubt that on the km walked thing v km ridden. IT just doesn't reflect anyone's experience. IF I walked to work along pavements I am MUCH safer than when I ride in traffic. Did the study only count walkers who were cooked on glue and acid?

Well no, they recorded all road deaths for the UK. Subjectively you might feel more at risk riding along the road than walking on the pavement, but it's not necessarily true.

It's possible if you could compare like with like (e.g. Sober adult pedestrians with sober adult cyclists) that it would look different, but we can't be sure.

ah it's the distances covered isn't it? You generally bike much further than you walk? But still the billions of short-walk trips would deluge the no. of bike trips, and v likely the total distances covered? Really tricky to estimate.

A few years ago I witnessed a school mate of one of my children fall off their bike whilst cycling to school, without a helmet. Serious head injury and sadly they died a few days later.
For that reason alone I wouldn't allow my young children out without a helmet

Please do not let your child ride without a helmet

I worked with someone who was knocked off his bike and died of a head injury. He wasn't wearing a helmet because they'd just moved house and he hadn't unpacked it yet. We don't know if he would have survived the accident with a helmet but it's just not worth the risk IMO.

Yes. No bike helmet, no bike. Ditto for the penni board.

They did until they went to secondary but now they won't wear them at all despite all our protestations and DH wearing one every day.

Definitely yes to helmets, I even wear one on the rare occasions I ride my bike.

It won't stop the rest of their body getting hurt but if you can protect a really important part of your body, why wouldn't you.

Swimming lessons also a must even though it's bloody bankrupting me

In the Netherlands, no matter what a cyclist does, if a car driver hits them then they have to prove that they were not at fault - even if a cyclist goes through a red light the car driver has to be able to prove that.
Consequently car drivers are very careful around cyclists in the Netherlands.

I used to have a friend when I was a kid, who had a brother who was knocked off his bike by a car when he was 10 and was left severely brain damaged. I will definitely be making DS wear a helmet and if I ever sort the tires out on my bike, I will wear one too! Although I never did as a teenager...but I was invincible back then :)

Non-negotiable, and we, the parents, wear our bike helmets too - same for ski helmets.

I have two friends who religiously wore helmets and cycled accident-free, on the days they couldn't find/forgot their helmets they were knocked off bike by car/came off at high speed.

We all wear helmets. I didn't wear one as a child. To be fair to my parents they probably weren't around much in the late 70's early 80's. I fell off my bike just riding up and down the path in our garden and landed on my forehead. I knocked myself out and had a lump the size of an egg on my head. I didn't have any fractures or anything, but I still have a bit of a lump there over 30 years later.