There were two pieces of advice moms universally give their children-don’t run with scissors, and to look both ways when you cross a road. Research from the University of Iowa indicates that the latter piece of advice is especially important, as it appears that children “ lack the perceptual judgment and motor skills to cross a busy road consistently without putting themselves in danger.” Children from the ages of 6 to 14 years were placed in a realistic “simulated environment” and asked to cross one lane of a busy road several times. The video below shows one child taking part in the road simulation
The research shows children under certain ages lack the perceptual judgment and motor skills to cross a busy road consistently without putting themselves in danger. The researchers placed children from 6 to 14 years old in a realistic simulated environment (see video) and asked them to cross one lane of a busy road multiple times.
“The crossings took place in an immersive, 3-D interactive space at the Hank Virtual Environments Lab on the UI campus. The simulated environment is “very compelling,” says Elizabeth O’Neal, a graduate student in psychological and brain sciences and the study’s first author. “We often had kids reach out and try to touch the cars.”
The results: When facing a “string of approaching virtual vehicles travelling at 25 miles per hour (considered a benchmark neighbourhood speed) , children had to cross a nine foot road 20 times. Researchers found that six-year-olds were struck by vehicles 8 per cent of the time; 8-year-olds were struck 6 per cent; 10-year-olds struck 5 per cent of the time, and 12-year-olds were struck 2 per cent. Children aged 14 and older had no accidents. With 8,000 injuries and 207 fatalities involving children under 14 in the United States in 2014, this study showed that perceptual ability and motor skills are not as developed in children, and they need larger gaps in traffic to access traffic speed and have compromised crossing ability.
“They get the pressure of not wanting to wait combined with these less-mature abilities,” says Plumert, corresponding author on the study, which appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, published by the American Psychological Association. “And that’s what makes it a risky situation.” Recommendations include educating children to be more patient waiting, and requesting city planners to demarcate intersections where children will cross with age appropriate “crossing aids”.
I wonder what the lower age limit for the elderly is? What proportion of our population is denied independence by the fact that our neighbourhoods are transected by kill zones?
My son is 11. I have no fears about him playing in the park on his own. I have never been concerned with the infinitesimal chance of child predators: so far as I am concerned, cars *are* the the child predators. He wants to roam the neighbourhood on his own, but I won’t let him cross streets. I don’t trust the drivers.
In a residential neighbourhood like ours, no matter how unexpected the child’s behaviour, cars simply should not be driving fast enough to cause serious injury. But they do. (No thanks to the city for the killer wide streets.) My son should be free to roam. He isn’t, and he hates it. And so do I.
They are asking the wrong question. The right question is, at what motor vehicle speed is it safe for an 8yo to cross?
Answer: Zero km / hr on a pedestrian-only street. Otherwise, the risk will always be there even at slow speeds.
Exactly. Easier to keep perpetuating the culture of fear though. That way the onus for road safety stays primarily with parents and kids and the engineers, politicians, and drivers never actually need to change anything.
My kids are 10 and 12. They’ve been walking to school and back by themselves – .9 km, for a year now, after having me accompany them over a thousand times. I was relentless in inculcating safety: counting cars that were coming; verbalizing what the traffic situation was – that’s a good method – it forces focus. They know there is one clear danger spot. Once over that – no problem.
But that one torrent of cars is scary. One house along the street has been penetrated two or three times. He has since put up concrete planters.
I’m aware of other spots where motoboneheads have crashed fences and wrapped themselves around poles. No amount of driver training is going to change the mentality of these boy racers. Their licenses should be stripped for five years if they don’t kill or maim someone. For life if they do. Many, if not most, vehicles have black boxes. We can determine what they were doing before impact. Same goes for cell phone records. And the idiots that eat, drink, smoke and crash – you can forensically figure that out too.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
8-year-olds were struck 6 per cent of the time? Damn, I guess I got lucky. I use to cross at 18th and Victoria as a 7 and 8 year old all the time. Yay for me!
The corollary of this is that as drivers, we have to be especially careful of young children and not make the assumption that they will be as careful or react the same as adults (and let’s face it – a lot of adults, especially those with cell phones, are just as bad).