Hot Baby Products: Baby Safety Helmets?
Tuesday April 15, 2008
I have to thank Buck Wolf, About.com Weird News Guide, for the heads up on Thudguards, baby-sized protective helmets that are now available in the U.S. Though these stretchy baby helmets look funny, their reason for existence is quite serious. ERs see plenty of youngsters with head injuries each year. In fact, Buck mentions that Thudguard received endorsement from the British Association of Accident and Emergency Medicine!
Do you think baby safety helmets will take off in the U.S. market? Or is this product going a little too far towards overprotective parenting? Add your thoughts by using the comments link below.
Do you think baby safety helmets will take off in the U.S. market? Or is this product going a little too far towards overprotective parenting? Add your thoughts by using the comments link below.
Comments
Oh, heavens, I hope not! Good grief, babies have been falling since they first learned to stand. Move out all the dangerous furniture, put a gate up at the steps, and don’t leave them unattended when they’re wobbly or in the climbing stage. Do they make helmets for three yr olds who try to fall off their bed, or eight year olds who fall while bouncing? How about for ten year olds who fall out of trees? The sad truth is, you can’t protect your children as much as you’d like!
Babies at age one cant help but fall over but a child of 3 should hopefully have learned to balance by then! To have a preventative measure rather than end up at ER is sensible and it is very unreasonalble for people to say that all ages will end up having this helmet. Do you remember riding a bike for the first time? Well what do you think a baby has to go thru for a few months?
I hope this not only catches on, I hope more parents in the US begin to take head injuries more seriously. It’s ridiculous to compare what a crawler or new walker is going through to that of older children. My 7 month old has no way to comprehend the ramifications of his actions. He is exploring and doesn’t understand what will hurt him. I’m watching him bump and bruise himself all over the house while simply trying to be more mobile. And you know what . . . it hurts him and the pain is real. He can’t protect himself so it’s up to us as his parents to do it for him.
The whole “babies have been doing this” forever attitude is ignorant. There are a lot of stupid things we used to just let our children muddle through until we got smart over the years. It was only a few decades ago that we started giving infants anesthesia for surgeries and only recently did the FDA start recommending pain medications for circumcisions. Why do we think our children need to go through this kind of pain to enter the world with the rest of us? (And don’t even get me started about what we still do to animals.)
We just ordered a thudguard. Not because we heard about it but because we got on-line to seek out a product to protect our baby’s head after many falls and bumps since he started sitting up and crawling. It’s the answer to our prayers and I can’t wait to get it. I’ll tell all my friends about it as well. The Brits are right on with this one.