At What Age Can Kids Safely Cross the Street?

HealthDay News 21 April 2017
Family First Comment: Recently the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published an excerpt, in their AAP Daily Briefing, from a study in the April Journal of Experimental Psychology. The study reported that children under the age of 14 are not cognitively capable of crossing a busy street “because children lack the perceptual judgment and physical skills needed to consistently get across safely.” This same AAP, however, also frequently promotes the claim that children this age or younger are cognitively capable of deciding that they are the wrong sex. Moreover, the AAP also deems children cognitively competent to consent to puberty blockers, toxic sex hormones and mutilating sex reassignment surgery. And abortions without parental notification!
Ironic.

Crossing a busy street requires calculations too complex for kids younger than 14, a new study finds.
In simulated experiments, University of Iowa researchers found children lack the perceptual judgment and physical skills needed to consistently get across safely.
“Some people think younger children may be able to perform like adults when crossing the street,” said study corresponding author Jodie Plumert, a professor of psychological and brain sciences.
“Our study shows that’s not necessarily the case on busy roads where traffic doesn’t stop,” Plumert said in a university news release.
In 2014, there were 8,000 injuries and 207 deaths involving motor vehicles and pedestrians aged 14 and younger in the United States, according to the National Center for Statistics and Analysis.
For this new study, researchers used a realistic simulated setting to assess the ability of children ages 6, 8, 10, 12 and 14 years to cross one lane of a busy road.
The younger children consistently had difficulty crossing the street safely, with accident rates as high as 8 percent among 6-year-olds. Even 10-year-olds were struck 5 percent of the time, and 12-year-olds, 2 percent of the time, the findings showed.
Only the 14-year-olds consistently crossed the street safely, according to the study authors.
READ MORE: https://consumer.healthday.com/kids-health-information-23/child-safety-news-587/at-what-age-can-kids-safely-cross-the-street-721785.html