A big part of your responsibilities as a parent involves protecting your children from danger. Still, you can’t spend your whole life surveying the environment for possible dangers. Instead, you need to learn about the biggest risks your children face and try to keep them safe by making good decisions.
Understanding where they have the most risk is important. Many people probably think their cars are where their kids are most likely to get hurt, but that is not the case. Every year, hundreds of kids die in crashes, but only 91,000 report serious injuries. In other words, while car crashes are a major source of child deaths, your car isn’t where your child is the most likely to get hurt.
Where are your children most at risk of a serious injury?
Where children play, they also get hurt
Play is a big part of how children develop their physical abilities and personalities. While out on the playground with other children, your kid will learn social rules. They will also attempt to perform increasingly difficult physical tasks, starting with going up the stairs and down the slide and culminating in swinging from the monkey bars.
Failure at any of those tasks might lead to a serious injury. Every year, roughly 200,000 children go to the emergency room in the United States because of injuries they suffered on a playground. Over the course of 10 years, almost 150 children will likely die on playgrounds. It’s worth noting that most injuries took place on public playgrounds, while most of those fatalities occurred at home or private playgrounds, like those in the yard of a daycare provider.
You may have to pursue an insurance claim against the school or the daycare facility to recover your medical expenses, as health insurance likely won’t pay a claim for care if they believe premises liability plays a role.
Minimizing risks shouldn’t mean isolating your children
Yes, playgrounds are dangerous, but they are also where your children will learn so much and find exciting ways to challenge themselves. Although playgrounds can lead to injuries, that doesn’t mean you should tell your children that they cannot go play on the slides.
Instead, it means that it’s important for you and them to be aware of their physical limitations and to know your rights in case anything does happen. Knowing how to cover the medical bills when your children get hurt will make it easier for you to be an advocate for them during their recovery.