The fourth of July is upon us which in America means fireworks. Problem, where we live shooting off fireworks by individuals are illegal within the city limits though there are some lovely professional, displays available for the public to attend? Unfortunately, fireworks fascinate many younger people and it’s a battle to make sure the boys (and sometimes girls) in our house don’t shoot any off. I think the best solution (and what I did last year) is to send them to celebrate with a friend who lives outside the city in a rural area where they can set off their bottle rockets and other explosive devices in the direction of a lake. It’s now being suggested that the kids should just be told to go the public displays or take their chances with the police if they want to try something. I think that’s a stupid idea and will only lead to the kids getting into trouble.
Public professionally operated displays are fine, the other parts of the suggestion suck rocks and bilge water.
Stick to your idea, they might learn something.
Fireworks are illegal in a lot of rural areas due to the serious wildfire hazard. Don’t assume that sending them out there is ok.
The friend whose property we’re going to has already checked that out. There’s even a nice fireworks stand a few miles from his house.
I’d be very cautious. There’s a reason fireworks are illegal in so many states. My uncle blew off the skin of his right hand with a bottle rocket. The entire thing had to be grafted with skin from his thigh. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of them even doing it in the first place, but if they have to do it, it should be under the supervision of someone who is highly safety-conscious and very experienced.
Fun fact: 4th of July is one of the worst nights of the year for EMTs.
The vast majority of kids are just fine with* watching* fireworks. Sure they may want to shoot off their own, but your obligation as a parent i to teach them that they can’t have everything that they want, not to enable every thing possible.
I’m not saying don’t send them to the lake but, NOBODY is saying " It’s now being suggested that the kids should just be told to go the public displays or take their chances with the police if they want to try something". WHO says children should “take their chances with the police if they want to try something”?
Yes, fireworks are objectively dangerous, and always have been.
OTOH, teenagers are immortal and invulnerable. And smarter than their parents, just ask 'em, so telling them otherwise is pissing into the wind. And fireworks of all sizes and types (and participation, from formal curated displays to “let’s go down to the quarry and blow stuff up”) is a deeply-held tradition.
The safest answer is definitely the “watch the professionals do this professionally” answer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t appeal to the young’uns. And forbidding it adds the allure of the forbidden to the allure of fire and noise and primal destructiveness.
I guess it’s not much different than giving your kid a roll of condoms or a pack of BC and hoping for the best.
This would be a good fit for the “different things in the 60s/70s thread” but when I was growing up, kids casually played with fireworks and parents never blinked an eye about it. There was no great stream of maimed children. (My mother’s generation had M-80s and cherry bombs back when they were serious explosives and not tiny toys with the same name.)
You didn’t hear about it because no Internet.
Well, yes, when my uncle nearly blew his hand off that was during the 70s. Telling me it’s not that dangerous is going to be a hard sell, given how much his shriveled up hand is an indelible part of my memory of him. But I don’t have the statistics.
My BIL is has been an emergency room doc for almost 30 years. He sees the streams of burned and maimed kids that come through his ER. We were just discussing this the other day actually because a young nephew wanted to buy fireworks (they’re legal).
Sure, you can provide anecdotal evidence of people you know who did get blown up, and I can give anecdotal evidence of the many fireworks users I grew up with where none of them did. (Okay, a friend’s older sister once held a roman candle the wrong way and got a round up the armpit, but somehow didn’t get burned.)
Every kid I grew up with bought fireworks. No one got hurt.
For every 1000 kids that use them safely there’s that one kid that didn’t. That’s the kid that gets in the news.
I always supervised my daughters when they used fireworks. Making sure they did it safely.
Define ‘fireworks.’ Sparklers? Bottle rockets? Roman candles? According to some statistics I’m digging up, 45% of fireworks related ER visits are related to Sparklers. Interesting. But almost as many are related to illegal fireworks.
It looks like one of the biggest tolls is not injuries, but property damage related to fires.
You can’t teach common sense. The danger from fireworks is not high, but it is real.
Also, it’s 3.5 injuries per one pound of fireworks sold. I’ll dig deeper when I’m not on my phone.
Everybody remembers when we were growing up riding in the backs of pickup trucks and nobody we know ever got killed, but there’s still damned good reason for seatbelt laws.
Interesting maps here. (I think that my state, SC, had some of the least restrictive fireworks laws in the country. At midnight on Dec. 31, it looks and sounds like Baghdad during Shock and Awe.)