Giving Parents Tools for Risk Reduction

Imagine a situation where a group of people is responsible for protecting children from a potential danger.  We could be talking about any group of people and any flavor of danger, but for this example, let's choose thrill rides.  In the realm of amusement ride safety, several groups of people share responsibility for keeping children safe.  We'll choose "parents and caregivers" as the responsible group for this example, but the same prerequisites apply to engineers, owner/operators, ride attendants, mechanics, and inspectors.

In order to fulfill their responsibility, parents and caregivers need to know precise information about:

1. The nature of the danger

2. How it can be avoided

3. The consequences of failure

The parents' and caregivers' ability to respond appropriately depends on the quality and specificity of the information provided.  If either of the first two elements is missing or vague, the child will be exposed to danger through ignorance.  If the third element is missing or vague, the child will be exposed to danger through a deficit of urgency, alertness, and/or attention on the part of the parents and caregivers. 

Extra credit assignment: Click these links to substitute ride attendants, manufacturers, inspectors, or design engineers for the group "parents and caregivers".  See if that brings any insight into what might be causing the kiddie misconduct accidents.

The world presents an endless array of dangers to children, and an equally endless array of warnings to parents.  Parents, like all other human beings, prioritize according to what they know and how often they hear it.  If they know their child is in danger of losing life or limb, most parents will react.  The success or failure of that reaction, and the point at which they intervene, depends on how much accurate information parents have about the particular danger and at what point they realize the potential magnitude of the outcome.  For example: 

• Parents who know that toddlers have suffered serious brain injuries from falling down a flight of stairs are more likely to choose homes without stairs or install stair gates while their children are young.  Parents who don't know about that hazard can only react in the moment (i.e., when they see the child teetering at the top of the steps, or when he's already fallen to the bottom).
• Parents who know that children have drowned in three inches of water are less likely to leave their own kids alone with the mop water.  Parents who don't know about that hazard can only react in the moment (i.e., when they find their child head-down in the bucket).
• Parents who know that young children have fallen out of amusement rides with fixed lap bars are more likely to make their own children ride with an adult.  Parents who don't know about that hazard can only react in the moment (i.e., when they see their child falling out of the ride, or after she's already been hurt).

Parents, on the whole, are not inherently stupid or negligent.  It is not unusual for a parent to circumvent half a dozen potentially lethal child safety interactions before breakfast:  cribs, drawstrings, curtain blinds, stairs, stoves, pools, toy chests -- the list goes on.  Here are a few things that aren't on the modern day parental alert list:  garden hoses, ping pong, shuffleboard, sneezing, and pillow fights -- or any product the national media portray as safer than sneezing (what a great new slogan for IAAPA:  "Thrill Rides - Safer than Snot"). 

Parents treat rides like benign playthings because that's how they're portrayed in advertising, and "research" papers on ride safety.  Parents don't worry about fall hazards, entrapment hazards, and ejection hazards related to amusement rides because those issues aren't seriously discussed in public.  Occasionally, after a major accident, they might be bickered over for 30-seconds on a TV news show.  Imagine if that's the approach we'd used to alert parents about passenger-side airbags.  How many parents do you think would've tuned out that message if it had been presented through industry spin and did-not-did-so interviews on the Today Show?

Most child safety hazards on amusement rides are as easy to solve as the airbag problem.  Parents didn't stop buying cars when they found out about the child safety hazard posed by airbags, they just stopped loading their kids into the front seat.  Simple fix.  Everybody wins.  Here's the winning strategy used in that case:  1) make sure that all of the organizations parents trust (corporations, consumer safety agencies, physicians, etc.) send out the same message, 2) agree on a short, specific recommendation targeted to parents that's easy to follow, clearly explains the consequences of failure, and has a realistic chance of solving the problem, and 3) get the message out to places where parents will see it often and understand it thoroughly. 

The same strategy would help to prevent child safety accidents on amusement rides, except too many pieces are missing from the equation. 

• The consumer safety agency that parents rely on for child safety information is forbidden from teaching parents how to protect their children on amusement park rides.
• The physicians are, for the most part, as ill-informed as parents about child safety hazards on thrill rides.
• And the corporations, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot carry negative news to their customers.  It would run contrary to every modern business principle.  The lawyers wouldn't allow it, the marketing folks wouldn't allow it, and the bean-counters wouldn't allow it -- and I'd be willing to bet that more than a few investors would sue any public company that voluntarily spilled its guts about a product interaction with the potential to crush human children.  Even if it's only a few children.

The crushed kids aren't good for business and neither are the bickering sound bites.  I don't like providing those sound bites any more than the industry likes hearing them, but I will continue to play Jane Curtain to the industry's Dan Ackroyd as long as I believe that parents are being misinformed.  That misinformation is dangerous to children.

Giving parents detailed, accurate safety information about the products their children use doesn't have to be viewed as a negative for business.  On the whole, parents aren't freaked out to learn that a product can be dangerous to children.  Children are walking magnets for disaster, and every mommy on earth knows it.  Just about any product can be lethal in some obscure way.  It's the obscurity that endangers the child most, and it's the confusing messages that escalate a parent's anxiety and distrust.  By covering over the problems and "controlling the message", the industry ensures that more parents will fail in their responsibility to protect their own children.  By adopting a media strategy that dismisses serious accidents as nuisance events, and denies any connection between a crushed child and the machine that crushed her, the industry sets up cognitive dissonance.  Parents are smart enough to know that something doesn't sound right, but they don't know enough to understand what.  I think that's a risky business strategy over the long haul, but that's the industry's concern, not mine.

The children are my concern, and have been since my own 5-year-old wound up embedded in a roller coaster (for those who care, he was exposed to danger through my ignorance).  The reason children keep getting crushed by amusement rides is because there isn't any logical system of prevention in place for the 70-90% of accidents that the industry doesn't feel responsible for.  According to ISO/IEC 14121, an international standard for "Safety of machinery - Principles of risk assessment", the formal term for the 70-90% of accidents assigned to patrons is "residual risk".  That's what's left over at the end of the risk assessment process, after the manufacturer decides that the risk has been reduced to a level that his company can tolerate. 

According to the standard, the risk reduction process can be concluded when "the user is sufficiently informed about the residual risks in different phases of the life of the machinery".  I certainly wasn't sufficiently informed in 1998, and I've never talked with the parent of a child involved in a bad thrill ride accident who wasn't totally stupid about the real cause, even years after the fact.  I think that's what's missing here, a logical system to describe the particulars of residual risk for the public so that parents can decide for themselves what's tolerable and what's not -- before they load their children on a ride.  And who better than Saferparks to create such a system?  Nobody understands ignorant mommies or residual risk on roller coasters better than me.  Here's what I envision:

• We need a system that specializes in teaching consumers, who may never have seen an amusement ride before, enough about the workings of the rides so that they can recognize and avoid the danger zones before it's too late.
• The information fed into the system has to be as comprehensive, structured, and detailed as possible -- and free of spin.
• Saferparks can't force anybody in the industry to pony up secrets.  In order to work, the system has to be intrinsically non-threatening and designed in a way that is either neutral or beneficial to at least some manufacturers, owner/operators, and/or state regulatory agencies.
• Because of the non-uniform nature of the input data, the system will not produce any statistics.
• We can't set any rules or place any requirements on industry.  Every recommendation in the consumer standards will be targeted to consumers.

At first this seemed like an overwhelming task, but as luck would have it, the International Standards Organization has everything needed to guide the development of child safety standards for users of heavy machinery:

• ISO/IEC Guide 50:  "Safety aspects - Guidelines for child safety"
• ISO/IEC Guide 51:  "Safety aspects - Guidelines for their inclusion in standards"
• ISO/IEC 14121:  "Safety of machinery - Principles of risk assessment"
• ISO/IEC 12100:  "Safety of machinery - Basic concepts, general principles for design"

I'm calling the data collection system "Ride Information Depository & Exchange System", RIDES for short.  A concept demonstration will be online soon.  The working title for Saferparks' first consumer guide to residual risk is "Guidelines for the Safe Use of Amusement Rides by Children".