Top 3 Most Common Causes Of Fatal Injury To Children
For most people, a child being seriously injured is the worst thing they can imagine. Parents often go to great lengths to keep their children safe and there are many laws designed to do this as well. Despite our best efforts, however, injuries to children are often tragically unexpected or unavoidable. In fact, over 12,000 children each year in the United States die from unintentional injuries. By familiarizing ourselves with the most common causes of these injuries we can take extra precautions. However, it’s important to understand that we can sometimes do everything right and still suffer an injury due to another person’s negligence. In that case, there are options available to help you cope with and recover from the harm caused.
Most Common Causes of Injury to Children
- Car Accidents. The combined leading cause of fatal injury to children aged 0-19 was harm caused by automobile collisions. In the majority of these accidents the children were occupants in vehicles that were involved in a crash. However, a significant amount of accidents were also caused by pedestrians, bicyclists, and bystanders being hit by vehicles. It is very hard to mitigate risk in many of these cases. However, ensuring that children are in age- and size-appropriate car seats or wearing seatbelts, that they are supervised while playing near streets or roadways, wear helmets when riding bikes, and taking care to drive within the speed limit and leaving plenty of space between other vehicles on the road, can all help to avoid some of these tragic outcomes.
- Drowning. According to the CDC, drowning is the primary cause of accidental death in children under the age of 4. Many circumstances can lead to this outcome, such as not paying attention for even a few moments during bathtime. However, most accidental drownings occur at or around pools. It’s critical that if your child is near a pool that you are paying attention, as it takes less than a minute in most cases for serious injury to occur. Children are also notorious for sneaking into pools unsupervised, so if you or your neighbors have pools, it’s important that they are inaccessible to small children. In many cases, people believe that installing a fence or a warning sign may be sufficient to keep children out, but pools are considered an attractive nuisance, likely to attract children even despite barriers that may serve as a deterrent to adults. For this reason, it’s critical to ensure that pools are actually inaccessible to children, and not just that they appear to be.
- Suffocation. CDC data reflects that for children under one year of age, two-thirds of all deaths are caused by accidental suffocation. This can occur if a child is put to sleep on their stomach or manages to roll over in their sleep and then is unable to roll over again. Swaddling infants, understanding how to place them in their cribs for sleep, and utilizing video baby monitoring, can all be helpful in mitigating these risks.
Talk to a Lawyer
If your child has been seriously injured as the result of someone else’s negligence, you do not have to shoulder the burden alone. Contact Lyons & Snyder Trial Attorneys to schedule a consultation today. Our Delray Beach personal injury lawyers will help you get the compensation and support that you are entitled to.
Resource:
cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html
