It’s far easier to blame the builders of a parking garage here, rather than accept the fact that your beloved child is a slobbering moron, and that your child-rearing somehow left the impression that a fall from a parking garage won’t necessarily kill you. But parents are called to do the hard thing sometimes, and the right thing here would be to educate the brain-dead little creep somehow.
I’m amazed, frankly, that the parents in question didn’t blame video games or Road Runner cartoons. Characters always walk away from falls in these, and if they’d mentioned this, they would have had even more fawning press.
This case seems just tailor-made for a nuisance lawsuit ruling, and I dearly hope some judge has the balls to rule such.
“And then they built a complete fence, but they realized there’s still the possibility for someone climb over it! So now they’re electrifying it, which will certainly prevent anyone from hurting themselves…”
His problem was that he looked down – everybody knows that if you don’t look down, you don’t fall. Just ask Wile E. Coyote!
Sheesh – does anybody have any sense of personal responsibility anymore?
And the senior Tim Bargfrede is understandably distraught over his son – but how does he figure it’s the garage’s responsibility to prevent this sort of stupidity?
Does he have a sign in his front yard: “Warning – if you decide to jump under my lawnmower while I’m mowing my yard, you may be injured” in case somebody decides to do just that? After all, he didn’t prevent them from doing it – it must be his fault!!
Or maybe he should post, “Don’t climb on my roof and attempt to swing to the neighbors’ roof like Spider Man!”
I have a friend who has three sons. She told me that you have to specifically tell them not to do things, so you have to be very creative in figuring out how they can possibly misuse other people, pets, and anything in the house. That leads to some very odd statements (including the classic exchange, “Did you take a shower?” “Yes.” “Did you use soap?”). I thought this was just for boys, but obviously it still applies to teenagers. It’s just the way things are–if you don’t tell them not to jump off a parking garage, how can you expect them to know that they shouldn’t do it?
And boys have been doing stupid stuff like this for a long time. My grandparents had a big old barn with an opening on the second floor to throw hay down to the stalls on the first floor. It was about the width of a hall, and there was a concrete floor underneath. So my brothers and I are playing the barn, and after we got tired of climbing the rickety ladders up to the roof, they started jumping across this big gap in the floor. They dared me to do it, and I looked at the cement floor one story below, and I said, “No way.” I always was the smart one.
There are signs on some of Calgary’s overpass bridges that state “Don’t jump off bridge.” I suspect it’s because people have casually hopped over the railing, thinking there was a sidewalk there, but no, not so much. Well, there is one - 30 or so feet down.
There are stupid people everywhere, doing stupid things. Some of us don’t make it out of our teens/early twenties. It’s not always because we’re smarter than the dumb ones that get caught - sometimes we’re just luckier. But the parents blaming the garage - that’s just people lashing out in a highly emotional state, I believe - looking for some explanation for something that doesn’t make sense.
I’ve said it before and will say it again, if the Brown Brothers can get $108 Million (later reduced to $25 million) for diving into shallow water and breaking their necks from the city of NY, then I figure Master Bargfrede has got at least a shot at a million from the Parking Garage owners (Or the city of Orlando…Who may have made a mistake putting up fences after the ‘accident’).
Because - possibly unlike your friend’s three sons - most kids aren’t retarded.
I do not ever recall my parents specifically instructing me not to chop off my own penis with an axe, or not to swallow a stick of dynamite, or not to set my hair on fire with a blowtorch, or not to hurl myself from an eighty-foot height. Incredibly I avoided doing any of those things. If your kid is older than six or seven and cannot extrapolate general commands (e.g. “Don’t hurt yourself”) to specific situations (e.g. “It is probably a bad idea to saw off my left arm with a steak knife”) then your child has some sort of mental problem.
Kids will take RISKS they shouldnt take from time to time, but whose fault is that? Theirs.
MagicEyes, my children tried that, but were shot down at it, at a very young age. If they were smart enough to have an excuse ready (i.e. “But you didn’t say to use soap.”), then they were smart enough to know the entire meaning of the request and that they were actively trying to circumvent it. Weaseling in my house only works if you have a nice coat of fur, four paws with sharp nails, a chin like Frank Burns, and the ability to be placed in a cage when bad without running afoul of local Child Protection Services.