Safety Helmets Urged for Children Bike Passengers

Children who ride along in bicycle-mounted seats should wear approved, crash-tested safety helmets, experts say, as a growing number of children are being seriously injured in cycling accidents.

In a study of injuries to bicycle passengers, Dr. James Sargent, a pediatrician at Boston City Hospital, found that 65% of the injuries to children in bicycle-mounted child seats are to the head and face.

“The reason for that preponderance of head injuries, we believe, is that these seats put children high off the ground, and that when the bicycle falls over, the child’s head is the highest part of the whole bicycle.

“You combine that with the fact that toddlers don’t have much head control. Their heads are heavy in relation to their bodies, and they don’t have the muscle development an older child has,” Sargent said.

California Highway Patrol records of bicycle-related injuries and deaths to children under age 6, from 1977 to 1986, showed that the number of injuries to cyclists remained relatively constant. But injuries to passengers jumped from 17% of the total in 1977 to 28% in 1986.

“This is a real problem, one whose magnitude has been insufficiently appreciated, and a problem that is largely preventable through some common-sense measures, primary of which is putting a crash-tested helmet on a child,” said Dr. Jeffrey Sacks, a specialist in injury epidemiology and control at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Injuries to children on bikes “are not accidents,” he said. “They’re failures to follow simple precautions.”

Sargent had these tips for choosing a helmet:

“Some infant helmets are not appropriate. They’re just foam-lined. In order to be appropriate, they’ve got to have Styrofoam as part of the helmet. Helmets like that are crash-tested.”

There are no government regulations for helmets, but the Snell Memorial Foundation and American National Standards Institute certify crash-worthiness of helmets.