ON YER BIKE!

Kate’s thrown under the bus for a simple accident

Ilearned a salient lesson the other day about raising issues around your kids in public. Everyone wants to offer their advice and opinion.

mentioned on my radio show that my daughter had flipped off her bike. She’d accidentally hit the wrong brake and slammed the front wheels to a halt instead of the back ones. As it ground to a standstill front first, it flipped over her. Her chin was split open, she broke the scaphoid bone in her hand, had bruising and grazing up her hands, chest and legs, and she sprained her other wrist.

I mentioned it on air because part of the pain of splitting your chin open and having stitches is that it really hurts when the local anaesthetic wears off. She’d woken at 4am unable to go back to sleep and was upset. So she was calling and texting me at work as I was about to go to air, and I was trying to reassure her I’d be home soon to give her a big hug.

I shared this with my listeners, just in a passing comment about how the struggle is real as a working parent – no matter what you do, or at what time of day, when and if your child needs you or wants a hug from Mum, it’s tough. I flippantly said as I threw to an ad break that “the bike’s been put away for now”.

And boom, there it was: Beep beep, in came the texts. I was offered a lot of unsolicited advice about how the mentality of “putting away the bike” was

“typical of people these days”, how the best thing would be to teach her bike safety, to get her right back out on the bike, to not put it away.

Here’s the thing, when you hear a snippet of information from another parent, you don’t have all the facts. She knows how to ride a bike, she knows about bike safety, it was a singular moment of panic and brain fade – she had a mental block and forgot which brake to use.

The bike has not been locked away forever – the bike was put away because in her current state it would be nothing short of dangerous and irresponsible to put her back on it. One arm is in a cast, the other is swollen and in tubey grip. Neither hands is capable of holding on to a bike at this point. But as messages rolled in to me about how I could or should have handled it, I couldn’t help but think why are we so quick to try to blame and shame other parents?

Accidents happen. People get hurt or injured. They recover and they get back on the bike.

I’m sure the people messaging me meant no harm or weren’t meaning to offend (or maybe they were?), but what I learned is that as onlookers into other people’s child rearing, we don’t have all the facts, we don’t know the full story. We need to support other parents in their efforts and trust that they know what’s best for their child. Being judgmental is easy, but being supportive is better.