Make Child Safety Job One
Practice Safety For The Children
As a parent if you could make one place a safe haven for your children, where would it be? For many parents, the answer is their homes. Yet research shows more than 4.5 million children are injured in the home every year.
Taking simple prevention measures and closely supervising your children can help protect them from common household hazards, such as fires, burns, drowning, suffocation, choking, firearm injury, poisoning and falls. A few easy, relatively inexpensive steps – locking household cleaning materials in a cabinet out of reach, installing carbon monoxide detectors and smoke alarms, blocking stairways with baby gates – can greatly reduce your child’s risk of injury in the home.
According to USA Safe Kids, an advocacy group for child safety sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, preventable injuries take an enormous financial, emotional and social toll not just on the injured children and their families, but also on society as a whole. Unintentional injury is the leading cause of death among children ages 14 and under in the United States, claiming more than 5,600 child lives annually, or an average of 15 children each day. In addition, there were nearly 11.8 million medical visits for unintentional injury among U.S. children ages 14 and under in 2000, or one injury visit for every five children. More than 16 percent of all hospitalizations for unintentional injuries among children result in permanent disability.
With this information as background I must report a tragic incident, a hybrid if you will, between a household accident and a car/pedestrian accident. This item comes to us from WMC TV in Memphis and it occurred in Springdale Arkansas. The police reported that an unsupervised 12-year old boy was moving the family car out of the driveway so that he could play basketball and he failed to see his unsupervised 22-month old baby brother behind the car.
An older sister was supposed to be watching the baby was not there when the baby was hit by the car. The police report did not say whether a parent, or any other adult was present at the home when the accident occurred. The magnitude of this death cannot even be fathomed and just telling the story leaves me with such empathy for the family. But the story does point out why it is that no matter whether a motor vehicle is on the road and being driven by an adult licensed driver or sitting in the driveway, when children are involved we as adults must take all steps necessary to see to it that the children are safe.
As experienced Nashville automobile accident attorney’s we have seen horrible injuries and deaths but when a child losses life under these preventable circumstances like this it shakes even a harden veteran. From the Staff and Attorney’s of Phillip Miller & Associates we send our deepest condolences to the family and friends and our hope that other parents can learn from this death.
Phillip Miller is a Tennessee Accident Attorney specializing in
Phillip has an AVVO rating of 10.0 (Superb), has been designated as a “Superlawyer”, and is the President Elect of the Tennessee Association for Justice.
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