re: Do your kids wear a helmet when riding their bike?

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the statistics aren't on your side.

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the statistics are overwhelmingly on my side.

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so is not riding a bike. so is staying inside all day.

of all the people i've ever known in my life, thousands probably, who rode a bike without a helmet as a kid, i know precisely zero who had a head injury from a bike fall

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well, most preventative measures aren't in place because the incident of injury is common. So, for you, what rate of head injury while riding a bike is significant enough to warrant wearing helmet.

And, no, I never wore one as a kid; I do now, and I will have my kids wear one.

Also, while it's probably rarely enforced and cyclists have the right to share the road with vehicles, cyclists must wear a helmet, have a white light on the front and a red blinking light on the back and use proper hand signals to indicate turning. That's the law if you're going to ride bikes on the road.

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the statistics are overwhelmingly on my side.

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Your use of the word "negligible" is where my problem lies. Negligible implies the chance is so small that it doesn't matter. There is a small chance, but it's a small chance of something very serious. Same reason they wear seat belts.

An average of 247 traumatic brain injury deaths and 140,000 head injuries among children and adolescents younger than 20 years were related to bicycle crashes each year in the United States. As many as 184 deaths and 116,000 head injuries might have been prevented annually if these riders had worn helmets.

Such an easy thing to prevent by wearing a piece of plastic on your head. Do better as a parent.

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But I wouldn't lose my mind if they wanted to.

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yeah if they wanted to i absolutely wouldnt care. but i'm not going to make them.

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Your use of the word "negligible" is where my problem lies.

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i dont care where your problem lies. i'm not telling YOUR kids they dont have to wear helmets. wear helmets, kneepads, elbow pads, have a ball. i dont care.

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Do better as a parent.

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oh, get fricked.

Yes. You’re a dumbass if you don’t make them.

All our bikes were stolen

Oh god I confused you with SuperSaint, my apologies. Carry on.

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I feel like when I have a little girl I'd probably be more pro helmet with her. But I have a 3 and 1 year old boys that are already knot heads.... I'm also not anti helmet. I'm pretty indifferent and curious how others feel about it

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I taught my oldest daughter to ride a bike. It took a long time to do so, but it was fun to watch her go from a nervous nelly to a confident kid. She had a helmet and I asked if she wanted to wear it. She said "no". My wife was terrified when I would let her ride around the block by herself, without a helmet. But I told my wife she had to start developing some sense of independence.

On one such trip I was outside waiting for her and she had not made it around the block in the amount of time it usually took her to do so. I started walking over to the the other side of the block and saw her slowly riding down the street...with a bloody knee and a scrape on her hand. She had fallen off the bike.

The dad in me wanted to scoop her up and carry her home to clean up her scrapes. But when she got to me I could tell that she desperately wanted to cry, but was absolutely refusing to do so. She had fallen and hurt herself. But she was not going to let anyone see her cry. So she picked herself up and rode home, even though she was hurt.

It sounds strange, but in that moment I was so proud of her for being tough. Many kids her age probably would have been covered from head to toe in pads, yet still would lay in the road frantically crying for any adult to come help them. She didn't. She learned that day that sometime things are going to happen where you get hurt and you can't just lay there and cry. You have to fight through the hurt and keep going.