Parents Rushing Children to Hospital With Minor Injuries Face Charges

According to a new report from the Australian Institute of Family Studies parents of clumsy children who rush with their kids too many times at a hospital's emergency ward, are at a greater risk for facing neglect charges.

According to the new report from the Federal Government's Australia Institute of Family studies, "it advises child protection workers to classify children who repeatedly hurt themselves as "high risk of neglect''  even if the injuries are minor. Accident-prone children might be the victims of poor parental supervision," it says.

Herald Sun quoted from the report, "In an assessment of child maltreatment, child protection practitioners should consider children with multiple accidental injuries to be at high risk of neglect, particularly supervisory neglect, and not be too quick to classify a child as 'accident prone' without carefully considering the role of supervision in those injuries.

"Children, who suffer a number of injuries, albeit minor in terms of severity, may serve as a warning that there are other issues of a potentially neglectful nature.''

According to the child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg who was quoted in Sun Herald, such a factor would promote over protective "helicopter parenting".

He said, "This may act as a disincentive for parents whose kids have legitimately hurt themselves to present to the emergency ward. Kids aren't made of glass. If you took this seriously you'd never put a child on a bike because they might go on the road and get killed by a semi-trailer.''

Couriermail quoted NSW Children's Commissioner Megan Mitchell who said," Parents were under "a lot of pressure'' to supervise children. I don't think we can expect parents to be super-parents but they need to know what their child is doing as best they can. There were no clear-cut rules about when to prosecute the parents of accidentally-injured children. You'd have to look at each individual circumstance and determine if there was a significant failure of care to the child. I would hope that (prosecuting parents) would be reasonably rare and that people in authority would establish a relationship with the families and then make a good judgment about whether there is a real problem or not.