I still feel a protective wave of shock every time I see a downy-headed one-year-old riding on the front of his mother’s bike—without a helmet. Those heads, I have been taught as an educated American mother, hold all of life’s potential. They are heavy, and they are fragile. The necks that support them are rather weak, and too much jostling—so the alarming video on shaken baby syndrome that every new mother at Butterworth Hospital is required to watch before discharge—can turn the brain to jello.
I’ve been a firm adherent to rear-facing car seats, five-point harnesses, and bike helmets as a mother for the last eight years. To date my greatest trauma was seeing my 8 year old’s jagged front adult tooth (in all of its just-grown-in glory), which she broke while riding her bike around the track by our house. I had taken them to the track to ride their bikes because there were no cars there.
Now Margaret not only has a reconstructed tooth, but she is also here in the Netherlands biking to school during morning rush hour. Our route is pretty short, but we do have to turn left across oncoming car traffic where there is no stop sign or light. She has been biking like a pro, despite having an old beater bike with very poor breaking capacity. She hugs the curb and stays out of the way of the many teenagers biking in groups while talking on their cell phones. I’ve got Caroline in a seat–without any straps–on the back of my bike.
Today when we got home and were rolling her bike into the shed, Margaret looked up and said. “Look Mom, I didn’t wear my bike helmet today. That’s ok, no one else wears one.”
“I know,” I replied. “I’m still not sure what I think about that.”
* * *
I’ll be thinking more about helmets in coming weeks, reading the lots that has been written about it. If anyone’s interested, they can see what I mean here: http://study-abroad-blog-amsterdam-ss.ciee.org/2011/03/bike-helmets-the-dutch-have-a-different-philosophy-ciee-amsterdam.html
and
http://joannagoddard.blogspot.nl/2012/04/motherhood-mondays-biking-in-amsterdam.html
Compare those pictures to the self-portraits of the author of that last post back home in America. Notice that both she and her kid have helmets on, and the kid is totally strapped in:
http://joannagoddard.blogspot.nl/2011/10/motherhood-mondays-riding-bikes-with.html
Lindsay Maddox Ellis 
I always wear a helmet when I ride in Michigan, even if I’m just going around the block, but I didn’t even bring my helmet to the Netherlands. My reasoning had everything to do with the car drivers and the infrastructure. Despite seeing hundreds or perhaps thousands of people commuting every day for a year in Leiden, I recall seeing a single car/bike accident. There a driver is at fault whenever a car and bike collide. Here in GR I see maybe a dozen people commuting by bike each day, yet hardly a week goes by when I don’t hear about a car/bike accident. Three people in my department have been seriously injured by cars in the last decade.
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