There is a 1 in 1.5 million chance that your kid would be abducted and killed by a stranger. It is hard to wrap your mind around those numbers, and everybody always assumes: What if it's my 1 in 1.5 million? If you don't want to have your child in any kind of danger, you really can't do anything. You certainly couldn't drive them in a car, because that's the No. 1 way kids die, as passengers in car accidents.
These kinds of comparisons always bother me, because they don't seem like a very good basis on which to make decisions. Presumably, these "odds" are arrived at by dividing, say, the number of child abductions by the number of total children. But it's not like you can conclude that if you leave your kid outside unattended, those will reflect the odds of an abduction. In some areas and in some circumstances, the chances of a child abduction will be higher than in others. Indeed, it could be that the very reason why the odds are so slim of a child abduction in the first place is precisely because most parents take lots of precautionary measures to make sure this never happens. If this is the case, then it certainly doesn't make sense to use this as a reason to stop taking precautionary measures!
It'd be like if someone refused to wear a bike helmet on the grounds that the odds of serious head injury are low, when in fact the very reason why head injury is rare is because everyone wears a helmet. You'd want to know the odds of a serious head injury amongst people who don't wear helmets.
The same holds true with car accident deaths. Defensive drivers have much better odds of avoiding accidents than aggressive drivers. Maybe some areas are more prone to car accidents than others--there is more traffic in some places, for example. The point is, within the set of all drivers, I'm sure that probabilities of an accident vary widely among individuals within the set depending upon their behavior and their environment. So general statistics that take into account all drivers everywhere don't necessarily tell you your personalized odds of an accident.
I mean, I understand that the point the author is trying to make is that we tend to misjudge certain risks, and it is possible that parents are being too risk averse if they, say, deprive their children of a playful childhood because they won't let them go outside unattended or something. But quoting statistics like these certainly doesn't make that case.
1 comment:
You're right, we need the right figures to test ideas, not irrelevant soundbites. In the case of road safety interventions, we need good use of all the available data, including control groups, and the trouble with bike helmets is that the figures don't show that they work - helmet laws have stopped a lot of people cycling and have done nothing for head injury rates. For the best academic work, see Robinson DL. No clear evidence from countries that have enforced the wearing of helmets. BMJ 2006;332: 722-5. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/332/7543/722-a.
It appears that helmets break easily, but don't absorb the impact, see the engineers quoted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet. A broken helmet has simply failed. At my moderately advanced age it's far too dangerous not to cycle - regular cycling, Danish style, not too far, not too fast, nearly halves the death rate, see http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/160/11/1621 All-Cause Mortality Associated With Physical Activity During Leisure Time, Work, Sports, and Cycling to Work. Andersen et al, Arch Intern Med. 2000;160:1621-1628. Helmets have also strangled some young children who were wearing helmets while playing off their bicycles.
I don't wear a helmet and haven't pressed them on my children. I do check that their brakes work and that they have a good idea of the rules of the road.
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