Joel, at 14 months, will eat with a fork but he will not walk. It isn’t that he can’t walk. We have seen him do it. He has walked across rooms. But he prefers crawling, which is faster and allows him to keep up with the big kids.
Maybe he is just waiting for this handy invention to hit the market: Thudguard
When I first saw the Thudguard, I was amused, but now I am scared that some safety advocacy group will begin to lobby legislators in one of the more big-brother oriented states that the Thudguard should be a required part of every child’s wardrobe.
Walk to the playground a block away? Put on your Thudguard, lest you trip on a pebble and tumble to the ground. Get up from the couch to go to the bathroom upstairs? Wait, my child, put on your Thudguard for the trecherous trip. You want to go out in the backyard to play on the swingset/chase the dog/make roads in the dirt? Not without your Thudguard, young man!
I can understand that helmets are necessary when kids (and adults) are engaging in sports and activities where high speed could truly lead to serious head injury and death. I used to work with head-injured adults and I have seen the impact of head trauma in real life.
Walking helmets, though? If ever such a law is passed, if ever such an invention is strongly urged by hyper people on the “Today” show, I will need a helmet to protect my head from the banging I will do on the nearest wall. Or the fainting. Or both.
What a ridiculous invention. I note, without surprise, that it seems to have originated in England. I think the further a society is from the frontier (both spacially and temporally) the more obsessed it becomes with safety. On a separate note, I think “big-brother” states are usually trying to impose things like taxes for health care, not walking helmets. Also, I haven’t watched the Today show in years, but both you and my mother-in-law seem to hate it — what’s up?
Its worse than that – the inventor’s Scottish! Saw it in my paper yesterday and she’s (why o why did it have to be a girl) spent £200000 getting this ‘child safety hat’ into production. Mind you with a name like Kelly Forsyth-Gibson she can probably afford to throw money around… which is probably just as well – she’ll see any of it back. Did nobody do the market research? This product truly sickens me.