Since this could get contentious, I’m putting this in GD rather than IMHO or MPSIMS. Mods feel free to move it.
Like (I think) most people, I’ve previously pretty much come down against the driver when a child is hit by a car. However, an incident this morning has caused me to rethink this and to consider the role of the parent of the child.
What happenned was that a woman ran across a moderately busy road with her two children, aged about 8 and 9 (not sure, though). Innocuous enough, except there was a pedestrian crossing in plain sight about 100 feet away. Now, if the parent doesn’t teach their children road safety, should they bear any responsibility if their child gets hit? Should a defendant be able to say, “My Lord, as the child had not been taught road safety, could the parents please say why the child was out of their supervision?” Assuming the driver wasn’t speeding, or drunk, etc, of course.
I think you’re mixing up two different things: driver responsibility in the case of a specific accident, and general parental responsibility to teach their child safety.
If a child gets hit by a driver, the driver’s responsibility or lack thereof (both legally and morally) shouldn’t have anything to do with why the child ran out into the road (or whatever the kid did that put him/her in harm’s way). It should only depend on whether or not the driver did something wrong.
Funny, I’ve never been inclined to, by default, blame the driver in collisions with children. Children are inherently unpredictable and notorious for taking unconscious risks.
In any case, I’m not sure the argument of improper child-rearing would fly. Even adults do stupid things and take lazy, risky shortcuts. I myself once came dangerous closely to flattening a woman on a bicycle as I was turning onto a one-way street. She was coming down the wrong way, in the center. Scary moment. Had something happened, I’d’ve argued strenuously that even if for some reason she could not be found at fault (i.e. she turned out to be a child or mentally ill or something), that didn’t mean the fault was mine, either.
Why? From what I remember about my childhood there were more than one instance where I almost got hit by a car because I dashed out into traffic from behind another object or unexpectedly.
I think it’d be an extremely difficult thing to prove. My parent’s and my school taught me how to cross the street but I didn’t always follow the rules. The fact that I broke the rules didn’t make my parents irresponsible, did it?
Once again, it’s a great big “It Depends.” If it’s a speed-restricted area, the driver should be going at the posted speed, which would probably enable him/her to avoid any pedestrian who doesn’t literally leap out in front of the car. If it’s a four-lane divided road where everyone is going 65 mph, and somebody runs out into the road, well, that’s evolution in action. And everything in between. There are times when there is absolutely, positively nothing you can do to avoid hitting someone. That follows whether it’s an adult pedestrian or a child. It’s also the reason WHY there are speed limits near schools and playgrounds, so that the undeveloped common sense of children is allowed for.
I know. In that case, unless s/he was careless in some other way, it is not IMHO his/her fault. O’course, I’m not the judge or the jury, and not even a witness, but that’s what I think on general principle. Sometimes it’s reasonable that a driver could have avoided an accident. Sometimes it’s not.
Funny, I usually react just the opposite. Barring any other details, if I hear, “Child hit by car,” I generally assume it was the kid who was behaving unsafely, not the driver. Responsibility is a learned behavior, and while there are lots of adults who have never learned it, there are ten times as many kids who haven’t learned it yet. I’ve seen plenty of news stories about someone who was driving in a perfectly safe, legal manner, who ended up running over a kid who was doing neither. The worst was a 16 year old girl who had just got her driver’s liscense, and killed some kid who darted in front of her car while she was leaving the DMV with her new license. The police determined that it was absolutely not her fault, but damn, the guilt must still have been terrible.
Legally? Hard to prove. Kids don’t always do what they’re told, no matter how well parented. Plus, even if it is clearly the parents fault, I don’t know how I feel about tacking on a criminal sentence to parents who are already going through the tremendous grief of losing a child.
Well, I do think that the parent you saw was being an asshat. I don’t know how far you can stretch that to cover fault for an accident that the children may suffer at some later date.
I live across the street from an elementary school, and we see parents doing things as stupid as that in the OP and worse. Some park across the street and yell for their kids to dart out to get to their car, since they are too lazy to get out of the car to get the kid - let alone have the kid cross at the crosswalk, which has crossing guards.
I’ve seen more than one case of drivers held blameless in accidents with kids. I’m sure they feel awful, but at least the law understands that it was not their fault.
It would be hard to prove a parent responsible - but they have to deal with the consequences, so I doubt this would be a useful thing to even attempt to do.
Even as a mother, I’m not sure I would blame the driver in all circumstances.
My own 11yo son is hard-of-hearing and has ADHD–heavy on the impulsive side. I have tried VERY hard to teach him road safety, including standing on the curb waiting for the Walk signal, even when there is no visible traffic in any direction. I monitored him in person in our neighborhood (where there is very little traffic, and where I even insisted that the city put up a No Outlet sign at the entrance to our cul-de-sac to cut down traffic as much as possible) until he was about 10yo. But I also realize that at some point, he has to take responsibility for his own safety.
If the driver is doing something stupid, like turning right without looking for pedestrians first, or speeding, then I would blame the driver. However, if the driver is following the rules, I certainly couldn’t blame him/her if my son just decided to walk (or ride his bike) into the road in front of him/her.
However, I have seen many instances where kids were being just plain stupid, as if no one had ever taught them how to cross a street or pay attention to traffic. The middle school my daughter attended had a five-line major road running alongside it. The school paid for three crossing guards at intersections near the school, so that the kids could cross this major highway relatively safely, but I still had to learn to watch out for groups of kids who chose to jaywalk across the highway between intersections rather than wait for the crossing guard at the intersection. That behavior could only have been learned from parents or peers, and was certainly discouraged by the school itself.
These two thoughts side-by-side suggest to me that the rational thing to do is increase penalties and enforcement of jaywalking laws, instead of adding to the burden of a parent whose child was hit.
Why consider the driver a defendant if he wasn’t speeding or drunk, etc? I’ve heard news reports in the case of tragic accidents close the report saying, “no charges will be filed.”
My father was driving me to elementary school. We were driving slowly through the country town where I lived. Just before we approached the town’s only traffic light, a six or seven year old boy darted from between two parked cars into our path. My father stopped, but not in time to avoid hitting him. There was no way. The child went down, but other that being very frightened, he was uninjured.
My father, on the other hand, was shaken in a way that I had never seen before.
Please don’t ever make assumptions about who is at fault. The burden of hurting someone – or even almost hurting someone – can be difficult even when you are not at fault.
You guys are ignoring the prime tenet of American Legal Life. Everything is someone’s fault! There are no accidents, because if it were an accident, the lawyers would have no source of income.
Sheesh.
Tris
“Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.” ~ Michael Levine ~
Many years ago I was visiting my parents and we heard screaming from next door. I ran around to see what had happened and found the neighbour’s young son run over by a truck in the driveway, inside the back gate of his own home.
When the coal truck arrived the mother had put the son inside while she went to unlock the side gate. She had forgotten that she had been out back and had left the back door unlocked. As the truck drove through the gate the boy ran under it.
I will never forget the look on the trucky’s face. While the mother was understabably distraught (the doctor sent me to the chemist to get her sedation), I can’t describe the haunted look on the driver’s face.
My mother told me later that the poor guy had had to give up driving (for psychological reasons) due to an incident that wasn’t his fault in any way.
Ever since I have been careful to leap to judgements about accidents.
I think the extra caution we use around children (school zones, red flashign light busses) are teaching our children that cars are not a threat to them, which makes them do ‘bolder’ stupid things like trying to cross the expressway during rush hour. Also I think it makes them more irresponsibile drivers, as they have no respect for the power of a car, no less a SUV
I think children catch on pretty early that they are primarily responsible for their own safety.
They hide behind Mama’s skirt rather than wait for her to shoo the doggie.
Why blame drivers and parents. Ask the kids, and they know they were the ones taking the risks and making the mistakes.