Today, another interesting topic from the recent Lifesavers Conference.
Presenter Pam Fischer, who has been active in safe teen driving in New Jersey and nationally for 30 years, presented a chart that compared the top five things that, according to surveys, parents worry about when it comes to their children, as compared to the actual top five causes of injuries and fatalities:
What Parents Most Worry About
- Kidnapping
- Sniper Attack
- Terrorism
- Predators/Strangers
- Drug Abuse
Causes Of Death For Teens And Children
- Car Crashes
- Homicide
- Child Abuse
- Suicide
- Drowning
This list in itself was dramatic enough, but as a matter of fact, Pam presented this list on Monday morning April 14, and then that afternoon, as the Lifesavers Conference attendees were at the annual NHTSA awards luncheon, the news of the Boston Marathon bombings started appearing on cell phones throughout the auditorium. In other words, that afternoon, Number 3 on the parent’s worry list probably escalated to Number 1.
The point of the lists, of course, was to illustrate that parents appear to worry more for their children about unknown and uncontrollable causes than they do about things that, although more often the cause of injury or death, are more commonplace, more familiar, more expected, and perhaps more within their control. Also, I do not know the exact question that was posed to parents to elicit these lists, or how the words “What do you most worry about?” were conveyed. In any event, the take-away from the chart and Pam Fischer’s remarks was clear: parents worry less about the safety of their teen drivers than they do about unknown and unpredictable causes of injury or death. I doubt that anyone who works in traffic safety is surprised by this, but it does shed an interesting light on the continuing problem of how we get parents to pay more attention to the safety risks of teen driving. The lists reinforce the idea that teen driving crashes are such a regular occurrence that we are not wholly surprised, and therefore less attentive to them than we should be.
