In May 2016, a 4-year-old managed to get into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo. In a successful attempt to remove the child before he could be seriously injured, the zoo officials shot and killed the gorilla. While there has been some debate as to whether the situation warranted the use of deadly force, there is general agreement that we should value a human life over that of an animal.
However, the debate that continues to simmer focuses on whether the child’s parents share in any culpability for the event. I suspect we will never know enough of the details to make a judgment on this question. And faced with that uncertainty, what I am going to say in the next few paragraphs does not apply to the situation at the Cincinnati Zoo. I am using that event only as a place to start a discussion.
You and I have seen scores of children who, because of their immaturity and to a larger extent to their temperament, are adventuresome and resistant to attempts by those who would like to keep them safe. You could label them as risk takers, but I don’t think those children are perceptive enough to understand that what they are doing is risky.
You could call them accident prone, but this raises the question of how many events that end in injury or death are really accidental. Almost all of those tragedies aren’t intentional. But how many were preventable? Of course, that depends on how broadly you define preventable. How far back in the chain of events that preceded an incident are you willing to realistically assign causality or culpability?
For example, a mother is standing on the sidewalk of busy intersection with a traffic light, holding her 3-year-old’s hand. Her cell phone alerts her of a text, she drops his hand to check it, and in an instant he darts out into the travel lane to grab what turns out to be an empty candy wrapper and is struck by a car. Was this an accident?
I suspect that if we interviewed family friends, neighbors, and maybe even the child’s pediatrician, we would learn of several dozen examples of the child’s unusually impulsive behavior. We also might learn that he had been resistant to his mother’s attempts to set limits and modify his behavior. In other words, his past history suggests that he was an “accident” waiting to happen.
Who is culpable here? Should the driver have been more aware of the pedestrians who were waiting to cross and, seeing that one was a young child, realized that some little children are more impulsive than others and driven more prudently? Should the child’s mother have accepted the fact that while some 3-year-olds can be under “voice control,” her son was certainly not one of those and ignored her phone?
Should the child’s pediatrician, who was aware of his temperament and impulsivity, have spent more time with the family on how to manage his behavior? Dr. William J. Turtle published a book in the 1970s titled, “Dr. Turtle’s Babies,” in which among other sage advice, he suggests most if not all toddlers should be fitted with a harness until they can be trusted. While you and I may have trouble selling this concept to parents – particularly parents of post toddlers – a harness or wrist-restraining tether might have saved this 3-year-old’s life. Whether a child’s impulsivity is age appropriate or pathologic, we must include advice on its management in our anticipatory guidance. There are very few true accidents, many are incidents that were predictable – and to some extent – preventable.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine, for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.”
