Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in my uterus will implore you, beg and plead.
PLEASE don’t get her started on the subject of bike helmets.
There are four of these people, they are almost all grown and everybody’s skull is intact. The defense rests.
There’s no question. Bike helmets are not attractive. They look funny and they mess with your hair. They are not comfortable. They make your head sweat and if you are not careful that little clasp pinches the skin under your chin and it results in a lot of yelping. Bike helmets are not, as the DeMeer spawn have insisted over the years, “cool.”
Acquired Brain Injury isn’t cool, either.
In the years BC (Before Children), working in a small newsroom, I covered only two kinds of bicycle accidents - the fatal kind and the non-fatal kind. In each instance where a child died while riding a bike, that child was not wearing a helmet. A child picked up off the pavement while wearing a helmet – possibly injured in many other ways – invariably lived to ride another day.
When the DeMeer children were very young, they were the only kids on the block who were required to wear helmets while playing with the Little Tykes Coupe and the Big Wheels.
Stories of them being forced to wear helmets for walking to the corner store are exaggerated.
The DeMeer family coined the phrase “helmet-nazi”.
No one got on a bicycle without a helmet, even if they were just riding around the back yard on the grass. A DeMeer child spotted at the park or on the main street with a helmet dangling uselessly from the handlebars faced serious consequences. Lectures were given. Bikes were impounded to the top story of the barn. Essays were written about the importance of bike helmets.
On a spring day 11 years ago the middle DeMeer boy – the one who should rightly have been named 911 – stumbled through the back door with dirt on his face and blood oozing from both elbows and a knee.
Halfway through the application of soap, water and peroxide he burst into tears and gulped: “I was wearing my helmet Mom. I was wearing my helmet.”
In the driveway, beside a slightly battered bicycle, the helmet lay discarded. The plastic cover had broken away and when I picked it up, the thick protective foam split neatly into two pieces.
Helmet destroyed. Head fine.
He hadn’t even been hit by a car. He was just biking down the sidewalk when a large hedge jumped out in front of him and he went over backwards, cracking his head on the concrete.
Indeed, many fatal or serious bike accidents don’t involve motor vehicles. They involve ruts in the road, loose gravel or uneven curbs.
Stories about the “helmet nazi” sleeping for a week with that broken helmet, carrying it around in the van, taking it into the hockey dressing room to demonstrate the importance of bike safety and even stopping along the side of the road to share it with random helmetless children are not exaggerated.
As your kids head out the door for their bikes this spring remember these sobering statistics from the Canadian Paediatric Society.
Bicycling injuries are the fifth leading cause of child and youth hospitalization in Canada. Head injuries account for one half of all bicycling injuries in children and youth and ultimately between 45% and 100% of all child and youth bicycling deaths.
Be smart.
Heil Helmet!
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publisher@similkameenspotlight.com.
andrea.demeer@similkameenspotlight.com
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