Children: Nature's Speedbumps

Over the weekend, there was a piece on the news about how The University of Iowa was conducting research to better understand the cause of children's bicycle injuries. Due to advances in virtual reality the researchers were able to immerse children, ages 10-12, as well as adults, in a safe virtual environment, in order to observe bicycle safety behavior. Their conclusion. The reason children have bicycle accidents with vehicles: They didn't successfully judge traffic gaps. Wow. That's money and time well spent. Who needs a cure for Cancer, when we can pool our resources to find out that the reason kids become flattened fauna is because they didn't wait long enough to cross the street. Maybe these children should stick to less tasking past times like utilizing their motor skills with a Lemon Twist or perhaps start a leaf collection.

I'm more than a little tired of how today's kids have to be coddled and protected from everything from swallowing cereal prizes to inadvertently gutting themselves with a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine. I find it incredulous that generations of children before them managed to survive Stretch Armstrong, E-Z Bake Ovens and playground equipment constructed of actual metal, all without losing an eye or somehow mangling themselves. Why, we even managed to not suffocate ourselves on the Twister mat or impale ourselves on Lincoln Logs. Wowee! We musta been some kinda mavericks! And on the rare occasion we did get hurt, our parent's first instinct wasn't "Someone must pay!." We both just marked it up to being a dumbass and knew not to do it again. Lesson learned.

But then today's parents have so much more to contend with, what with their ever-important cellphone calls and all, to do pesky stuff like pay attention to their children. Why take responsibility for not exercising common sense when you can just blame someone else and maybe get a settlement out of it in the process? What? You say your child got injured while running in the store like a maniac? It's not your fault. There were clearly no warning signs posted. What's that you say? While you were getting yourself a latte at Starbucks, your precious angel was buried in a landslide of ceramic coffee cups, while climbing the display case like it was Mt. Everest? This clearly wouldn't have happened if more business establishments had child care centers. It's clearly their fault. I'd sue those rat bastards, if I were you.