Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 4, 1994 TAG: 9407270001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: Joe Kennedy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He rollerblades. He skateboards. He rides his bicycle and takes to the hills on his motorized dirt bike.
Traveling in the car with his parents, he urges them to go faster, to cut the corners more closely, to pull out in front of oncoming traffic.
His attitude is summed up in the phrase on his T-shirt: ``No Fear.''
It scares his parents to death.
Not because they weren't like that at 14, but because they were.
They've seen and experienced the consequences of youthful recklessness. They want to spare him that pain. They tell him that bad things can happen to young people, but their words leave no mark on his heart.
``Young people think they're invincible,'' says Scott Geller, a psychologist at Virginia Tech who has spent two decades researching and encouraging safe habits.
It's only natural, says Dana C. Ackley, a psychologist in private practice in Roanoke. They want to be powerful, like adults. They have little direct experience with death. And they're still figuring out who they are. It's hard to imagine themselves dying when they know they haven't finished growing.
No family is immune from this phase. Andi Wright, a registered nurse who coordinates trauma services at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, recently was in a car following her stepson and his girlfriend home from the beach. Her husband, an emergency room nurse at Community Hospital, was with her. During the journey, they noticed the boy was not belted in, despite the warnings he had heard at home.
Wright turned to her husband and said, ``I'm stumped. I don't know what else to do.''
Scaring them doesn't work, Geller says. Berating them doesn't, either. Young people know that bad things happen. They also know that no bad things have happened to them. And statistically, they probably won't.
But they might. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people between the ages of one year and 44 years, according to the National Safety Council.
Between 15 and 44, males are more than three times as likely as females to die in car crashes. Sometimes, surviving a wreck teaches them a lesson. Sometimes, it does not.
A couple of weekends ago, the trauma unit at Roanoke Memorial admitted two young victims of separate traffic accidents. Both were male. Both had been there before. This time, one had a broken neck.
Susan Hafey sees a lot of accident victims in her role as chief flight nurse on Life-Guard 10, the hospital's rescue helicopter. She says following a few simple rules would cut injuries and deaths significantly for all of us:
Don't drink and drive.
When riding or driving in a car or truck, wear a safety belt.
Restrain your children with seatbelts or car seats when they're in the car, and make sure they wear helmets when bicycling.
``Safety is an attitude,'' Hafey says, ``and if you don't have it through every phase of your daily life, you're guaranteed not to have it in higher risk situations.''
It's hard to get that across, especially to the young. Wright says tabloid television programs like ``Rescue 911'' make it harder, because they emphasize happy endings. People think any injury can be fixed. It can't. And they overlook the emotional effects.
``I don't think anyone who goes through a very traumatic event ever gets back to the same life,'' Hafey says.
The father of the fearless 14-year-old says his son was shaken when some friends died in a motorcyle wreck. So, too, when one of the father's friends suffered a serious brain injury in a car crash. The man hadn't been wearing his seatbelt.
Another Roanoke man said his college-age son saw the light when he flipped his truck on the interstate one morning as he rushed back to town from a weekend visit with his girlfriend.
With his seatbelt buckled, he survived. But he was badly injured.
``That had a very sobering effect on him,'' the father says. ``He became much more cautious.''
Most of us would prefer that our kids not discover their mortality that way. How, though, can we reach them?
For starters, Ackley recommends that we stop denying the existence of death. It's real, it'll get us all eventually, and we should deal with it openly.
``If kids can feel and see that death can be discussed, then it's more likely to be handled at the verbal level, where it's a lot safer, than at the behavioral, daredevil level, which scares us silly,'' he says.
We also should encourage our young to take up some other-oriented, caretaking activities, perhaps by volunteering at a hospital. Even the most macho males have a nurturing side, and we should encourage its expression.
Geller promotes ``actively caring.''
The idea is ``to convince people that it might not happen to them, but it's going to happen to someone, and that statistics are clear on that. ... It does happen to others. We should care about that, and we should understand what we can do to influence what others do.''
All of us, young and old, should congratulate those who practice safe habits. We should see ourselves as teachers, and set a good example.
And I think we grownups should keep talking to our kids, to make them hear our message - not ``No Fear,'' but ``We love you and we want you around, so be careful out there.''
by CNB