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Most people understand that children need special protection from some of the design elements that make amusement rides so exciting: heights, open containers on moving vehicles, fixed metal restraints sized for adults, accelerations in multiple dimensions, intense physical and emotional experiences based on speed and surprise, and potential exposure to machinery hazards. Posted rules, psychological barriers, and reminders to use common sense may be adequate protection for adults, but not for kids.
- Young children cannot read posted rules. They lack the cognitive skills to reliably follow a sequence of events or comprehend life-and-death consequences. It's very important to teach children rules as part of the long-term process of socialization and maturation, and as a supplement to barrier or supervision-based safety protections. But adults should never bet a young child's life solely on the child's ability to remember, understand, and comply with rules when they're exposed to serious safety hazards.
- A child's psychology is fundamentally different than an adult's. Psychological barriers only work for those who've been conditioned over time to perceive that particular object in that particular context as a barrier. Young children see objects for what they really are, and what they can be used to do (e.g., a piece of rope to play with; a chain with a clip mechanism that they can unlatch all by themselves; a horizontal metal bar to slide under or climb over; a bench seat to stretch your legs out on).
- "Common" sense in the area of heavy machinery hazards isn't something humans are born with, like suckable thumbs. Attaining common sense for any kind of machinery requires time, maturity, exposure, repetitive instruction, and life experience.
Toddlers, preschoolers, kindergarteners, and first-graders cannot protect themselves from serious hazards. Government accident reports on falls and ejections from amusement rides show that risk remains high for children through the age of nine. Just as children reach the age where they can be trusted not to fall off kiddie rides, they start interacting with bigger hazards on full-sized rides and the fall risk rises again. Kids in the single digits need special protection, additional layers of safety around amusement ride hazards. They need adult intervention. That's common sense from the parenting world.
So why, then, do parents persist in exposing their young children to serious hazards around amusement rides? The short answer, sure to earn me irate feedback, is this: because sometimes hazardous conditions are offered up by the amusement ride industry as an approved form of children's entertainment and marketed to parents and children.
Humans are self-maximizing systems, according to Dr. Jonathan Midgett, Engineering Psychologist from the Consumer Product Safety Commission's Division of Human Factors. We try to make the most of what we've got and extend the time we get to experience it. The phenomenon applies to all humans, not just parents of children who fall from amusement rides. Ride manufacturers want to maximize the revenue they get from a ride design, which creates pressures to lower height limits, minimize restraints, and re-use old designs for younger markets. Ride owners try to maximize revenue from the capital investment they've made in an amusement ride while minimizing labor costs and machine down-time. Parents want to give their children the widest possible array of experiences in order to maximize the entertainment value from their purchase of amusement park or carnival tickets. Children want to try new things, master activities they've experienced before in new ways, and mimic things they see adults or older kids doing.
A realistic Child Safety Plan is the only way to moderate all that self-maximizing drive toward newer, bigger, higher, faster, wilder thrills. Each adult involved in the process - from the ride designers who first imagine the machines to the parents who control their children's access to those machines - should have and execute a Child Safety Plan. In an informal sense, this already happens. Designer/engineers, manufacturers, owner/operators, and parents all have an idea of what the Child Safety plan should be on a particular ride. The problem is that there's no minimum standard for Child Safety Plans within the industry, very little common knowledge about ride design among parents, and no systematic way of comparing plans to make sure the cumulative effort covers all the safety bases. To paraphrase Dr. Midgett, the safety hand-off has to be coordinated or you'll lose more than your baton. The amusement ride industry may decide to develop minimum standards for child safe containment, but that will take time and is likely to affect only future designs. Children need protection today on all rides, new or old. Parents, having the clearest and dearest motivation, can provide that protection. They'll need some tools, though, and more information.
Step 1: Ride Safety Primer for Parents
The amusement ride industry makes an internal distinction between "kiddie" rides and "adult" rides. Kiddie rides are intended for use by preschoolers riding alone. Everything else is considered an adult ride, even if the minimum height limit is set low enough to allow preschoolers to ride alone. Allowable use is different than intended use, to folks in this industry anyway. By the time children reach four years of age, they are tall enough to ride unaccompanied on a whole host of adult rides with adult-sized restraints, adult-sized fall heights, and adult-sized accelerations. Some of those full-sized rides are designed with age-appropriate safety protections; some are not.
The giant gondola wheel and the roller coaster in the following picture are approved for use by 4-year-olds riding alone, but have very different levels of child safety protection. The giant gondola wheel has open cars, no restraints at all, and a deadly fall height. The coaster has lap bar restraints with foam-padded covers to help them closely contain each child rider. Both rides meet all industry standards and regulatory laws.
A significant number of ride manufacturers and owner/operators assume that parents are responsible for keeping children safe on rides with low height limits. In those cases, the business's Child Safety Plan for a ride is exactly the same as its Adult Safety Plan. Posted rules and adult-sized restraints are provided for all riders. In cases where the ride moves slowly or involves water, there may be no restraints at all. If a parent chooses to allow a small child on board, the parent must provide all additional layers of protection necessary to ensure their safety. In essence, the parent must become a reliable child restraint or take the risk that their child will slide, fall, or move into an unsafe position while the child's container is moving through space and the parent is watching from the ground.
Not all manufacturers or owner/operators are comfortable with that kind of minimalist Child Safety Plan. Many rides approved for use by young children are designed with individually-adjustable restraints that drastically reduce the risk of a child falling out (click on thumbnail image at right to see an example). Some mass-produced rides with a history of child containment failures can be retrofitted with seatbelts to supplement adult-sized fixed lap bars, if the owner/operator wants to spend the additional money and time on a more protective Child Safety Plan. Owner/operators can increase minimum height limits for unaccompanied children on rides with high fall or ejection risk, or require that children ride with adults on slower rides like Ferris wheels that reach great heights and do not have secure restraints.
The more protections manufacturers and ride owners provide in their Child Safety Plans, the more parents can trust and relax into the carnival or amusement park experience, and the lower the odds that a child will be seriously hurt. Parents still need a Child Safety Plan, but it doesn't have to cover so much basic ground.
Step 2: Risk Assessment Tools for Parents
Saferparks will be working to develop public policies and educational resources that help parents tell which rides approved by the industry for children's use are designed and operated in ways that meet the parents' expectations for acceptable risk -- and which rides aren't. The first step is getting people comfortable asking and answering the key question: What's Your Child Safety Plan?
- Parents should be able to ask a ride operator "what's the child safety plan for this ride?", and get an intelligent answer. In English. This is hardly an unreasonable question to ask before paying your hard-earned money to let a complete stranger hoist your priceless child through the air in a speeding, spinning machine.
- Owner/operators should be able to ask manufacturers the same question at trade shows when they're comparison shopping for new rides, or when they're considering the purchase of a used ride.
- Insurance underwriters could ask that question and set premiums accordingly, providing business incentives to protect young children from hazards they're too young to deal with.
- Regulatory officials and ride inspectors should be asking that question before they permit rides with low height limits to operate. State ride safety laws should require that parks and carnivals make the Child Safety Plan for rides with low height limits available to parents on request. Right now parents have to guess, and there's great variability in the level of child safety protection designed into the ride or provided as an optional add-on. If, for example, a parent is used to ride restraints employed at a child-friendly park like Knott's Berry Farm, they may assume that to be the norm. That assumption is likely to put their child at risk if they visit another park or carnival that has similar rides but doesn't provide child-conforming restraints. Amusement ride safety shouldn't be left to guesswork, especially where young children are concerned. Parents have the right to know what kind of safety equipment is provided on the ride and what the potential child safety hazards are before they buy a ticket for their child.
- When investigating accidents where a young child came out of a ride mid-cycle, public safety officials should ask everyone involved what their Child Safety Plans were. Ask the ride manufacturer, the ride owner, the ride operator, and the parent. Document each person's answer in a publicly accessible report. Rather than looking for one convenient person to blame, look for places where the Child Safety Plans failed to overlap, where the baton got dropped in the safety hand-off. That's the cause of the accident, and that's the key information we all need when planning prevention strategies.
- Parents should ask themselves and their children, "what's your safety plan", before entering the park or carnival and again before each ride. The question becomes part of the experience for the child and the parent, emphasizing the safety element. Children learn through repetition combined with action. Asking the question over and over at each new ride, each new age, each new venue reinforces the focus and illuminates different aspects of ride safety in an interesting way. The questions children ask and the answers they give help parents better understand their children's thoughts, fears, temptations, and assumptions about amusement rides. The process teaches parents and children about the variability of amusement ride design, and the importance of taking a careful look at each machine before getting on board.
Instead of comparing trade group statistics for overall amusement ride injury rates with government statistics for garden hose and pool cue injuries, why not allow parents to compare the child safety features on various amusement rides approved for use by young children? Sure it's important to know that fish hooks can get stuck in little Johnny's finger, but it's really not relevant to understanding and avoiding the serious hazards he's exposed to on some amusement rides. Johnny isn't in danger of falling 90 feet to his death from a shuffleboard court, or being caught and crushed underneath the garden hose. There are many amusement rides little Johnny can safely board, and a few that he'd better not. Let's start giving parents information that helps them figure out one from the other.
As for those rides that don't provide age-appropriate safety protection, they're still great choices for older children and adults. Young children represent only one slice of the overall market. Helping parents self-select safer rides for young children will free up space in the queue for those who can safely handle rides with less-restrictive restraints and a fuzzier line between thrills and danger.
Over time, I believe that the information gained and communicated by bringing focus to this one key question will help parents make better decisions about which rides really are safe for their children. The savvier parents get about this issue, the more influence they'll have over the industry's Child Safety Plans. The market should reward companies that go the extra mile to protect children, and it will when informed parents are driving the market.
- Saferparks Proposal: National Child Safety Standards for Amusement Rides
