Car Seat, Schmar-Seat

“Excuse me,” I say to a child of no more than three years. “You shouldn’t play on the treadmill. Especially with it on. It’s dangerous. Besides, I need to use it.”

The non-English speaking child looks up at me, her brown eyes unsurprised. She does not understand what I said about safety, but deep down she knows she does not belong on a treadmill. The treadmill is going slowly. I press the red button, and it slows to a stop. The little girl gets off and begins to play with dumbbells across the small gym.

I run for a while, proud of myself for keeping my mouth shut and not stomping into the aerobics class next door to track down and complain to the little girl’s mother. Safety and child care are, like many other things, culturally dictated phenomena and part of living abroad is learning to keep your opinions to yourself. As I run, I look in the mirror to watch the girl play with dumbbells and I am prepared to leap over there if she drops one on her foot.

Later, though, as I pant through a series of angled sit-ups and try undo some of the damage that the oily local food as done to my abs, the girl climbs back on the treadmill. She turns it on, jumping, running, and increasing the speed. Before I know what is happening, she’s tripped, flown off the back of it and just missed crashing into a rack of dumbbells.

She’s okay, not even crying, and wanders out of the gym towards the locker room. But I lose it anyway. I march over to the front desk where the nice Filipino girls work. I try to keep my voice calm, but I’m sure it sounds snappish. “Did I see that?” I ask. “That little girl just fell off the treadmill.”

They raise their eyebrows.

“It is very dangerous for children to play on gym equipment! Especially big machines, like the treadmills. Very, very dangerous.”

The girls stare at me. One cracks her gum, and, slowly, says, “Why?”

I am speechless. For me, the question is how you could not think gym equipment is dangerous for children. I have been using gyms regularly for almost a decade, and expect to see a label warning to “keep out of reach of children” on a treadmill the same way I expect to see a calorie counter. And even without a warning label, it is, to me, common sense. I have come dangerously close to falling off of treadmills dozens of times. I have dropped dumbbells on my feet and pinched my fingers until they bled adjusting the weights on equipment. I currently have three enormous bruises on one calf from the hip machine and its weighted, swinging pendulum. I am clumsy, but I am still an adult with fully developed motor skills. And even if I were the biggest klutz on the planet, the only people more klutzy than me would be young children.

The Filipino girls’ reaction to my complaint and the Arab mothers’ behavior led me to wonder if I was being overly cautious. I usually consider myself to be on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to child safety paranoia; I believe that kids should play in dirt, climb trees, and get scrapes. When they are old enough, and, unless perhaps they live in the Baltimore projects, they should be allowed to ride their bikes around their neighborhood, go to the store, take the bus. And, I thought, maybe gym equipment isn’t really any more dangerous than a playground. Maybe all of those warning labels had made me paranoid.

It turns out, however, that gym equipment is (surprise, surprise) dangerous for children. Last May, treadmill safety made news when Mike Tyson’s four-year-old daughter died in a treadmill accident. She was strangled by a cord hanging from the console. The most common injury involves kids getting their hands caught in the machinery. The moving parts can quickly cause friction burns. I read case after case of children getting their palms scraped off, their fingers burned away.

This is far from the first time that I have been shocked by popular attitudes towards safety while abroad. In Southeast Asia and Africa, an entire family will pile on one scooter and zoom around the congested city – without helmets. But those are third-world places, without the economy, infrastructure, and access to knowledge about safety that we have in the West. The UAE, in contrast, is wealthy and developed, but exhibits more than its share of safety violations.

One of the most horrifying customs around here is that car seats are not used (safety belts, are, of course, pure decoration). Every day I see BMWs and Mercedes speed by with women in the front seat, holding their infants on their laps. These vehicles move through the jam-packed Sharjah streets, where the only thing worse than the idiotically-designed arteries is the terrible driving, all cut-offs and slammed brakes. Not surprisingly, I have heard about several deaths involving children flying through the windshield during a crash.

Though I teach at a school with 2,000 elementary school students, including 300 preschoolers, the building itself is not child-friendly. There are flights of steep steps, hallways and classrooms with slippery marble floors, exposed electrical sockets, jagged wire hanging from the playground fences, heavy metal doors swinging wildly with no door-stops, and the main exit out of the elementary area is a walkway less than a yard wide. Children over five do not play on the playgrounds, but spend their recess in the parking lot. I have never seen a fire-extinguisher on the premises.

In my neighborhood, children play in sandpits filled with broken glass, and, when it rains, they play in raw sewage. The city lacks crosswalks, meaning that it is often necessary to run into oncoming traffic in order to cross the street. Street corners are extremely rounded so pedestrians and drivers alike do not know when to stop and go.

It is strange to me that every day I deal with parents who exhibit a great deal of misdirected concern for their children. Parents worry that their children cannot write their names at three years old, that they did not eat their Nutella sandwiches, and instruct me that kids’ scissors are too dangerous for small hands. But apparently the practicality of car seats in a myth, and treadmills are playthings.

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Tags: Children, health, safety