More young kids are getting injured. Is the growing use of hand-held gadgets to blame? (Shutterstock / Kostenko Maxim)
If you’ve visited a playground in the past few years, then you know about parents’ crazy addictions to their smart phones*. Many parents (and nannies) are immersed in email or engaged in a texting exchange while their kids make cakes in the sandbox, swing around on the monkey bars, and zip down the twisty slide.
And what happens if one of those kids is running around too close to the swings? Some experts are saying the child is more likely to get bonked in the head and end up in the emergency room because his parent is tied up in a game of Angry Birds on his iPhone.
In fact, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Emergency doctors are worried: They see the growing use of hand-held electronic devices as a plausible explanation for the surprising reversal of a long slide in injury rates for young children. There have even been a few extreme cases of death and near drowning.”
After falling for many years, nonfatal injuries to kids under age five are on the rise, increasing by 12 percent between 2007 and 2010. And the WSJ article rattles off a bunch more statistics.
Statistics from the government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission, which tracks injuries by product type, show children are getting hurt more during activities and at ages that would seem to warrant close supervision. Injuries involving playground equipment among children under five jumped 17% between 2007 and 2010, after trending down the previous five years, the commission said. Injuries involving nursery equipment such as changing tables were up 31% among children under five over that period, after declining over five years. Injuries involving swimming pools climbed 36% in that age group after a slight increase over the prior five years.
The WSJ article also includes some incredibly sad stories, like this one.
Cellphone distraction may have played a role in a tragedy that befell one Florida family. On Dec. 14, 2009, Shellie Ross called to her two sons, age 2 and 11, to come see a tortoise in the family’s backyard in Merritt Island. At 5:17 p.m., she posted a cellphone photo of the tortoise on Twitter. Records of her tweets show she tweeted four more times over five minutes.
At 5:23, operators took a 911 call from the 11-year-old, police records show: His little brother was at the bottom of the swimming pool, unresponsive. The police report says that Ms. Ross pulled the boy out and performed CPR. Rescue workers rushed him to the hospital, but it was too late.
Storeis like this and the increases in injuries are baffling when you consider the advancements in toy, playground and pool safety. Parents these days spend a fortune child-proofing their homes, some even going to the extreme of hiring an expert to help install baby gates. Today’s backyard swimming pools are typically surrounded by gates fit for a prison and a kid riding a bike without a helmet is a very rare bird.
And so why are more and more kids visiting the emergency room? Could parents’ growing use of hand-held gadgets really be the culprit? It seems likely that a parent texting might not notice that her kid is about to choke on a LEGO. But then again that same parent could be reading a book or vacuuming or watching TV.
What makes a cell phone different? I would argue that smart phones and other hand-held gadgets are different because they’re highly addictive. It’s easy to put down a book, and certainly a vacuum, when you hear a kid let out a cry, but when you’re on your phone you want to finish that text before looking up. When you’re texting, you’re actively engaging with someone and that typically feels good (unless it’s your boss chewing you out) and you don’t want to stop. Some psychologists suggest that using our iPhones and BlackBerrys may tap into the same associative learning pathways in the brain that make other compulsive behaviors — like gambling — so addictive,” according to a past New York Times article. “As with addiction to drugs or cigarettes or food, the chemical driver of this process is the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine.”
At this point, no studies exist proving that more kids are getting injured due to their parents’ cell phone use but when that study gets done, I have a feeling a few of us will be leaving our phones at home the next time we go to the park or the pool.
*I don’t mean to single out parents because so many different groups of people these days are addicted to smart phones, from teenagers to Baby Boomers.
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