Child Injuries-Who Is Responsible?

When kids get injured, we often dismiss it to their own carelessness. Kids are just kids, or kids are too wild, or kids often get hurt—that is normal.

There is some truth to this—the reason why kids need adults in the first place is to take care of them, and certainly, kids don’t have the same ability to look out for their own safety, the way that an adult does. But don’t be misled into thinking that every time a child is injured, it is his or her fault. Child injuries are serious, and happen because of many different causes.

Keeping Kids Safe

It can be hard to keep a child totally safe, because doing so often means keeping the child from engaging in an activity that he or she may enjoy. Rollerblading may put a child at a high risk of injury, but if the child enjoys it, it’s hard to keep the child from ever doing it.

However, we can do some things to keep kids safe, such as making sure that their caretakers are watching over them, and making sure that the products they use operate properly, and holding sellers and manufacturers responsible when these products fail.

Injuries at School

Let’s imagine a bunch of kids playing on a school playground, when one child gets hurt from a fall. Certainly, if the child was just running and tripped, it is unlikely anybody is responsible. But what about these scenarios?

• The child is running away from other kids who are bullying the child, and falls as he is running
• The child was running, and fell over an overgrown branch, or a construction object that was left on the school playground
• The child fell, and landed on an area of the playground that was dangerous, such as exposed, hard cement

Now, the fall isn’t just a fall—now, you can say that someone may have been responsible for the child’s injuries, and that the fall could have been avoided, or made less serious.

The school has an obligation to supervise children, and protect them from situations that can be potentially dangerous, whether that means keeping the grounds safe, or stopping or minimizing incidents of abuse, or bullying.

Negligent Supervision

The same holds true when the child is injured at someone else’s house—how many times has an adult just left kids to “play on their own?” If your child is injured when a supervising adult does that, you may have a claim against the adults who should have been watching.

Kids who play sports get injured, and that’s expected. But was the injury made worse by a failure to call for medical attention? Or a coaches’ failure to attend to the child, or the failure to hold the child out of further physical activity?

As you see, in many cases, child injuries aren’t just the fault of the child, and many can be minimized, or avoided completely, when adults exercise care and attention.

Contact the Miami personal injury attorneys at Velasquez & Associates P.A. today for help if a child in your family has been injured in any way.