May is National Bicycle Safety Month and East Tennessee Children’s Hospital is celebrating and raising awareness by offering events and trainings to the community throughout the month. Wheeled sports provide endless hours of enjoyment and great exercise for children, but many may not understand the potential dangers that can accompany these activities.
Keep your child safe when riding a bicycle with these tips:
- Wear a properly fitted helmet. Wearing a helmet reduces the risk of serious head injuries by 85% and severe brain injury by 88%.
- Ride on the sidewalk when you can. If not, ride in the same direction as traffic as far on the right-hand side as possible.
- Use hand signals and follow the rules of the road. Be predictable by making sure you ride in a straight line and don’t swerve between cars.
- Wear bright colors and use lights, especially when riding at night and in the morning. Reflectors on your clothes and bike will help you be seen.
- Ride with your children. Stick together until you are comfortable that your kids are ready to ride on their own.
Join Children’s Hospital for the month of May at many bike safety events, like Bike Safety Day at Dick’s House of Sport, Cub Club at Tennessee Smokies baseball games and Open Streets Knoxville. These events are a great way for children to have fun while learning about bike and helmet safety, basic maintenance and riding skills. The helmet safety program is designed to help prevent accidents when using wheeled sports and recreation devices including roller skates, skateboards, inline skates, bicycles, non-motorized scooters and retractable roller sneakers.
This is also a great way for children to practice riding a bike confidently, while learning the rules of the road. Here are a few tips on road safety children should practice:
- Stop at all stop signs and obey traffic lights just as cars do. Yield to pedestrians, stop at red lights and be especially careful at intersections.
- Always ride in the same direction as cars do. Never ride against traffic.
- Older children should try to use bike lanes or designated bike routes whenever you can – not the sidewalk. Children ages 10 and younger should ride on the sidewalk.
- When riding in a group, always ride single file on the street.
- Never wear headphones while riding — it’s essential to always hear everyone on the road.
All Children’s Hospital’s trainings and events are held by their certified injury prevention team. This team offers a wide variety of classes, trainings and events throughout the year ranging from bike safety to car seat safety and more. To learn more injury prevention tips, visit etch.com/community/injury-prevention.
Children’s Hospital works to educate and empower the children and families in the community by offering classes in a safe environment to ask questions, refine their skills and practice emergency care through scenario-based learning. To learn more about classes and events offered to the community, visit etch.com/community/classes-events.
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