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 ?

There are some really ignorant comments here.

The number one, by far, cause of traumatic brain injury is road traffic accidents. Not sitting on an armchair, RTAs. These comprise the majority of traumatic brain injuries, and are the leading case of accidental death, this is in spite of roofs, air bags, and whatever else. Given that the leading cause of death in RTAs is head injury, it's obvious that all motor vehicle occupants should wear helmets.

Secondly, pedestrians have NO protection whatsoever, and suffer lots of deaths and injuries every year on the road, yet people are still happy to walk and cross the road.

Given the huge numbers of people suffering life-changing injuries as a result of head injuries in cars, why are you not having your loved ones wear a helmet when in the car? Lewis Hamilton wouldn't start a Formula 1 race without wearing one, so why do you not care about your children enough to buy them a helmet when they go in the car?

Is this thread still going on?! I genuinely don't get it. You don't want to wear a helmet? Fine. But you have a responsibility, as a parent, to protect your kids as much as you can. So, the minute they get on a bike, you teach them biking road safety and say, "Dude, put on your helmet". Just as the minute they start walking instead of being in the buggy, you teach them road sense. And from the minute they are born, you teach them to be in a car seat and do up their seatbelt.

All of these ways of travelling on the road are completely different and you teach your kids the safest way to travel, according to how they are traveling. Comparing driving your kids (when the vast majority of the time, they will be in a car seat, doing no more than 40mph) to Lewis Hamilton doing upwards of 200 mph doesn't even make sense.

So put a helmet on them when they are walking down the road. Maybe some body armour too.

Your distinctions are totally arbitrary. You decide that you don't need helmets in the car because you are 'only' doing 80mph (40mph on what planet???), and you don't need them to cross the road, even though lots of kids get hit by cars crossing the road, but you do need them to ride a bike.

Is there any evidence for this conclusion? Not a shred.

Cycle helmets are an entirely arbitrary, given that we are more likely to suffer traumatic head injuries in cars, and don't wear them there (and forget this nonsense about driving carefully or whatever other rationalisations you have - you CANNOT ensure your child doesn't suffer fatal head injury in a car, and your only justification is that it's not as dangerous as F1, so well you accept that actually it's ok to not wear a helmet, as long as the risk isn't too high, but you feel sure that the risk is too high when riding a bike, even though you don't actually have any evidence to support that, and are incapable of making a rational choice between saying 'the risk of head injury in a car is 1 in 10 million, I will accept that, but I won't accept a risk of 1 in 5 million on a bike, and, er actually the risk is 1 in 4 million on foot, but ah well, nobody wears a helmet on foot, so why should your children.' You don't have those numbers so you don't know, you actually accept a nonzero risk that your child will suffer serious or fatal injury when you go in the car, a risk you refuse to reduce by wearing a helmet because you feel it isn't large enough, but you then go on to insist that you war a helmet in a bike, even though you don't know what the risk is there and don't know what measure of protection, if any, they actually offer.) And it's pointless analogising with seatbelts, the correct analogy with a seatbelt is another seatbelt, but bikes don't have them, but they also don't go at 100mph. Just because a seatbelt is essential when in a car, does not mean that an arbitrary other item of safety equipment that works in a completely different way, viz. a helmet, is essential when riding a bike.

What has Lewis Hamiliton driving at 200+mph got to do with kids riding their bikes?

Oh, why didn't I think to put helmets on my dc's during their waking hours to prevent head injuries Boomboom . Maybe because they are minor flesh injuries as a result of low speed bumps. A helmet wouldn't have helped anyway as they were to the front of the head.

How many people who've suffered a head injury have said they wished they weren't wearing a helmet? Pretty much all of them, as well as their friends and relatives, appear to be grateful that it wasn't worse as a result of not wearing one.

After all this discussion I still don't really know where I stand. I'm beginning to veer towards kitting us all out with helmets (we all cycle every day as we don't have a car). But there are some general points that I think come out of the discussion:

1. Cycle helmets are an individualised response to the question of road safety. The onus for the safety of cyclists is put on individual cyclists rather than on society-wide initiatives. Encouraging cyclists to buy a helmet puts the responsibility on them, rather than on collective actions such as reducing speed limits, legislating to limit car size (a real issue in crowded urban streets), providing good cycle lanes and routes, driver education, provision of bikeability training, discouraging car use and encouraging cycling, provision of secure cycle parking and so on. If helmets are the first resort, then these more significant (but collectively funded) measures are downgraded.

1. There is a real class dimension here. During the last week or so, as I have cycled round Cambridge which has the greatest proportion of cyclists in the country, and is also an affluent city, albeit with some extremely deprived estates I have been noticing who does and doesn't wear helmets. Generally speaking, helmet wearers are more middle class and well off -- and I do know this is a generalisation based on appearances, but it has been strongly evident enough for me to stand by it. Cycle helmets are much less prevalent in the less affluent parts of the city, and vice versa. I suspect that cycle helmets, by and large, have become a marker of middle class values. (I am talking here about their social connotations, I am not saying they have no protective value. I'm trying to think sociologically about them.)

1. The ways in which helmets affect behaviour seems to be important but it hasn't been studied enough -- how does wearing a helmet affect people's view of the intrinsic dangerousness of cycling? how does it affect behaviour on the bike? how does it affect other road traffic? These simply haven't been studied adequately.

1. The paradox that in the Netherlands almost no-one wears helmets and numbers of cyclists are very high, yet the rate of accidents (including head injuries) is very low has not been explained by proponents of helmets.

Sorry, an essay! Just wanted to get my thoughts down.

Nice summary niminy You get a prize for the most cogent summary of a long-runninging thread that I have ever seen on MN. Can you provide this function on other threads, please?

Point 1. Anecdotally, the people I know who have become more and more keen on cycling from a campaigning point of view, espouse this argument. I have seen similar statements from Chris Boardman. I think that this is right - any debate around national policies on helmets does displace time/debate that could profitably deliver much better risk mitigation for cyclists at a population level. And at that population level, there are so many benefits to be had by increasing the uptake of cycling (environmental impact, health & obesity, reduction of congestion) that any evidence that helmets may actively deter people from cycling at an individual level (heightened perception of risk/looking uncool) is utterly frustrating to those who are focused on those high-level goals.

Point 2. You might be right. Certainly, when I cycle through the less well-off areas of town, the cyclists I see are mostly young men on battered bikes without helmets. I guess they are using the bike for the reason it become such a popular mode of transport in the 50's - it's cheap and accessible and easy to get around. In the middle-class areas, cycling is a leisure pursuit with all of the attendant gear rather than the default mode of transport (although there are a proportion of cycle-commuters out of this demographic, I would hypothesise that they cycle from desire than necessity).

Point 3. Yes - not enough longitudinal evidence around risk perception and how it affects behaviours in both cyclists and other road users. I can not see who would fund it though....

Point 4. Yup!

It boils down to the personal v the political. Lots of anecdotes do not add up to evidence and what real evidence there is looks at population level. Therefore we each have to make the individual choice to wear or not wear helmets.

Evidence around brain injury incurred through leisure activities shows boxing, rugby and cycling to be the top three risk areas. I found this out by researching concussion after I came off my bike in the wet and was decidedly uncomfortable for 6 weeks afterwards. I was grateful to have been wearing a helmet at the time. My colleague with whom I swapped experiences of concussion, had fallen out of her loft (whilst not wearing a helmet!). You can't prevent all accidents, you can only seek to mitigate the risks as you see fit.

Actually the highest risk area for concussion is horse racing.

Statistically speaking, the risk of death is higher, per hour, in a car than on a bike, and four times higher when swimming. You are also less likely to be injured cycling than gardening, walking, or playing football.

The biggest causes of traumatic brain injury death are: being in a car, walking, riding a motorcycle. In order to reduce brain injury deaths, it would make sense to issue all car passengers and drivers with crash helmets.

Something I have learnt over the years is that people who are anti-cycle helmets will never be convinced.

And people who are pro-cycle helmets will never be unconvinced.

I take the advice of a close family member, who is both an avid cyclist, and a consultant neurologist who has specialised in brain injuries.

Their advice - 'no helmet, no bike'. Because the number of young people they see who have had an accident on a bike with no helmet, and ended up with avoidable brain injuries is heartbreaking.

The comparisons with the car are silly, you're not comparing like with like (and similarly with pedestrians).

The point about cycle helmets is that where they are most significant is in low level accidents or collisions. The equivalent of someone going into the back of you at low speed. In a car, that sort of low speed accident is not going to give you a significant head injury.

However, on a bike, an accident where you topple off a bike, or are clipped by a car causing a fall is exactly the sort of accident where a helmet can save your life. The sort of accident where you get up and walk away from. And that sort of incident is relatively common.

There's simply no point in trying to compare a high speed car accident with a low speed cycling accident - totally different levels of probability and consequences.

I am surprised that this keeps coming up on active as I posted my question on the 9th of this month .

I wasn't expecting such a long running debate or for people to be so passionate about children not wearing helmets .

I am so glad I didn't post this on AIBU

LilyBolero , that is what a lot of posters have said & I feel much better knowing that my Ds is happily riding around in his new helmet , if he has an accident I feel I've done all I can to protect him.

"There's simply no point in trying to compare a high speed car accident with a low speed cycling accident - totally different levels of probability and consequences."

Well no, because as has already been noted, there are other things in a car which reduce impact speed, such as crumple zones, air bags, and so on. So the consequences are comparable.

The leading cause of traumatic brain injury is being in a motor vehicle. And just like on a bike, most of these injuries are not fatal. So clearly helmets would help car passengers/drivers.

It's absurd to claim on the one hand that helmets are a panacea for cyclists, but also useless for car passengers. Especially given that if you scroll up a bit, we have another poster arguing the opposite, namely that normal cars aren't going too slowly for helmets to be useful.

are going too slowly even

It's just a non-argument. Whether people wear helmets in cars is totally irrelevant as to whether people should wear helmets on bikes.

Your points about crumple zones etc are irrelevant. The comparison I was making was with the 'most probable' sort of accident - in a car you are most likely to have a low speed impact, with no resultant injury.

On a bike, a low speed impact is a walk away accident, unless you bang your head. If you bang your head without a helmet you may walk away, but you may also have a brain bleed, resulting in life changing injury or death. A helmet makes this less likely.

Just to clarify - I wasn't comparing 'speed of accidents'.

It was likelihood of accidents. Comparing the consequences of the most likely type of accident in each case.

That's how risk assessments work. Look at the probability, look at the consequences to assess risk.

So have you looked at the probability?

The fatality rate for cyclists is 7.5 in 100 million trips, and 6.4 in 100 million trips for car passengers.

And the primary cause of death is 52% head injuries for cyclists, and 47% for car passengers. So while the risk of death due to head injury is slightly higher for cyclists, at 3.9 per 100 million rather than 3.0 per 100 million for car passengers, they are the same order of magnitude, and as such if a helmet is indicated for cycling, it should be worn by car passengers too.

And, as I pointed out above, around 90% of cyclist deaths are in collision with a motor vehicle. So they aren't nice low-speed walk away accidents, they are collisions with several tonnes of metal. Several tonnes of car into a plastic hat = dead cyclist.

It's impossible to compare.

Do you compare 'per hour' casualties or 'per mile'? Both could be justified, both would give different results.

Not going to argue this any further, as I said upthread, people don't change their minds on this one, once they've started churning out stats. I however will continue to insist on a cycle helmet for my children, as part of their general road safety education.

Myself and my kids wear helmets as I can certainly see no down side. However, feel really concerned with comments about "xx would have died if he hadn't been wearing one" or "Y would have survived with a helmet". There is no way even trained medical personnel can know this with any degree of certainty-it's pure conjecture and breeds complacency about the effectiveness of helmets. We need, and are currently lacking, proper, quality research into the safety and effectiveness of current helmets, and how / whether we can improve this for the future.

Most of us want to make an informed choice but a load of studies and statistics aren't telling me anything - does putting a helmet on my 5yr old make him ride more dangerously? Is that all it boils down to? Since he's the type of kid that will fall over walking in a straight line then he's very likely to fall off his bike (and has tipped it over with stablilsers on).

I'm certainly not going to choose to leave the helmets at home because we don't wear them in a car surrounded by air bags and crumple zones. However we do leave them at home for a 5min scoot down a 20mph road to nursery.

When people start off from a position of mutual incomprehension, they could learn a lot from each other, so long as they start with a position of mutual respect and desire to understand the other's point of view.

I think the OP was asking, given that she had a "no lid no bike" rule in her house, then when the lid went missing and her DP proposed taking her 7yo DC to school by bike anyway, and she objected, was she overreacting.

That's quite a specific question. The discussion has got quite diffuse. Maybe it should be on a different thread. I don't know I'd join in though. It's years since I had a conversation about lids. Too difficult box.

I hate posters who say this BUT I have not read the whole thread.

22 years ago my DS3 went out, for the first time, of the garden gate and was allowed to ride his bike. I could not afford to buy cycling helmets for DS1 and DS3 because their Xmas bikes had cost me a fortune. DS3 was almost 8 years old.

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon on a fairly quiet estate. I told him to stay on the pavement and not to go anywhere that he could not see the house. I walked back into the house and started the Sunday lunch....within about 5 minutes someone was frantically knocking on the door. When I opened the door next doors little girl was sobbing and saying that my lad had been 'run over' by a lorry.

He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The lorry had very slowly reversed and he was behind it. The lorry crushed him to death - mainly revolting head injuries.

For the last 22 years I have beaten myself up about my lack of care for my beloved lad. The longing to see him again is almost overwhelming.

In my opinion nobody should ride a bicycle without a helmet.

Lorries are a big killer of cyclists. The family of Eilidh Cairns, who was killed by a lorry driver (who got 3 points and a £200 fine on his licence for the killing, although he was later imprisoned when he killed again, knocking down and killing a 94-year-old cyclist) while riding her bike wearing a helmet in London have been campaigning to improve the safety of lorries, which cause about half of all cyclist deaths in London.

It's very distracting and unfair to the victims of road death to talk about helmets, yet it happens almost constantly, reports of cyclists being hit by lorries often comment on whether the cyclist was wearing a helmet. Lack of helmets do not kill cyclists, collisions with motor vehicles do.

Ensuring that motorists have strict liability, and are properly punished for killing cyclists would be a big step in improving safety. Forcing people to wear helmets, on the other hand, will make cycling less safe (since fewer people will cycle, and cyclists will become more marginalised and at greater risk).

Shabbs :( I'm really sorry.

Shabs {{{hugs}}}

I didn't know your lovely boy was on a bike at the time. :(