[blindkid] Silent cars and warning signs.

Richard Holloway rholloway at gopbc.org
Wed Feb 27 06:37:12 UTC 2013


Heather, I am curious-- when you suggest:

> If a child, blind or sighted, cannot be trusted to act reliably playing or crossing busy streets unsupervised, then they need to be supervised  by a responsible adult who knows the child's developmental level and likelihood of putting themselves in danger. The adult can then prevent the child from injury

Your point is well taken, but I am left particularly to wonder how silent (or nearly silent) cars factor in?

Also, I continue to stress that my personal take on the these signs is nothing close to a replacement for appropriate adult supervision. They are an added safeguard, just in case we can't be in the exact right spot at the exact right moment. So many seem fine with the concept of "child at play" signs, which would tend to indicate that parents of these kids must be at least a step or two away from their kids at times (or they would ned no signs), but apparently we parents of blind children are to be held to an "arm's reach" standard or the like so we can always redirect our kids until they have fully mastered their O&M skills. That seems unrealistic somehow.

All that aside, what can we do to keep our kids safe in a world with ever increasing numbers of quieter and quieter cars?  (And how can blind adults do likewise for themselves, for that matter?) If we can't manage to deal with quiet cars safely, the other issues seem to be potentially less and less important, as the percentage of quieter cars on the road grows each year.

It strikes me that if we cannot teach our blind children to listen for [nearly silent] cars, we are pretty much left with the option of trying to alert the quiet cars to blind pedestrians. Do you have an alternative to suggest?

I suppose we can all decide it is just too dangerous and closely supervise our children indefinitely, but at some point these kids will become adults and we parents will get too old to help them across the street. Fact of the matter is, I'm sort of hoping Kendra will be able to help ME across the street many years from now...



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