By Mark Rhoads
Yesterday I saw a 5-year-old girl racing her bike around the edge of a swimming pool and wondered where her parents or the lifeguards were. When I saw no one near, I called out to the girl to get off her bike. I had to risk the annoyance of some parent who might have thought I was interfering.
But when I was a kid almost all adults in our neighborhood looked out for all kids to make sure there were enough adult eyes on the street at all times. Two weeks ago I wondered how a 3-year-old boy could just fall into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinatti Zoo.
Today I wondered how a 2-year-old boy could be taken away by an alligator in a lagoon on Disney World property in Orlando.
We all understand that parents who are supervising more than one small child can easily get distracted and children move very quickly. But far too often we seem to read about tragic accidents that might have been avoided if parents had only applied a little common sense to avoid places and times that could put their children in harm's way.
Anyone can become a parent and there is no certification for the job. Some adults learn better parenting skills than others. But all parents have a duty to use common sense in the care of small children. Of course we naturally feel sympathy for parents whose children are harmed and we don't want to make their grief worse by blaming them when they are already grieving. But that sympathy should not obscure the fact that too often parental negligence is a contributing factor to accidents that might not have happened if normal common sense had been applied in a dangerous setting.
