Wear Your Bike Helmet, Get Free Ice Cream
Thursday, June 6, 2013 
This morning I read an article about an initiative by the Ohio Police. The CBC reported that:
Police in Ohio are on a blitz this summer to slap as many children as possible with tickets in an effort to keep local roads safe.
But unlike adults who dread the thought of traffic tickets, kids under 12 are setting out on their bicycles in hopes of scoring one.
You see, every ticket issued as part of the Brimfield Police Department's "Safe Summer" operation can be exchanged for a free ice cream cone at a local drive-in -- and the only way to get one is to be spotted by a police officer wearing a helmet while biking.
Is this a good idea? If you isolate the goal of getting more kids to wear their helmet, perhaps it is. But if you look at it within a broader spectrum of encouraging our children to lead healthy and safe lives, it certainly isn't.
The Yale Medical Group (and many many other experts for that matter) say that junk food shouldn't be used as a reward.
Using food as a reward or as a punishment, however, can undermine the healthy eating habits that you're trying to teach your children. Giving sweets, chips, or soda as a reward often leads to children's overeating foods that are high in sugar, fat, and empty calories. Worse, it interferes with kids' natural ability to regulate their eating, and it encourages them to eat when they're not hungry to reward themselves.
Offering otherwise off-limits food as a reward or special treat is also confusing. Children hear that they're supposed to enjoy good-for-them foods and avoid those with little nutritional value. Being told that they can indulge in foods that are bad for them as a reward for doing something good sends a mixed message. They may also start associating unhealthy foods with certain moods—when you feel good about yourself, for instance, reach for a sweet.
Oh, but it's just one ice cream. That won't hurt, right?
Wrong. It is never "just one". As Yoni Freedhoff writes, this has become a neverending problem in our society.
For us anyhow, it never seems to end. Saturday skating lessons often include lollipops, kids' grab bags from community races regularly contain chocolates, loot bags from friends parties might as well be renamed candy bags, libraries host events with names like "Donuts and Dads," bending a blade of grass with soccer shoes leads to sugar-sweetened sport drinks on the field and often ice cream or popsicles when the final whistle blows, and so on and so forth. And don't even get me started on juice. No doubt too, each and every time I speak up, there's someone out there telling me I shouldn't be so frustrated, as it's just "one" lollipop, it's just "one" ice cream sandwich, it's just "one" chocolate bar. If only it were just "one."
My conservative estimate is that my children, no doubt with the best of intentions, are being offered an average of at least 600 sugar-spiked calories of junk each and every week–junk that we had never intended on giving them in the first place, and in many cases, couldn't decline if we wanted to, since we wouldn't have been present at its offering. Assuming a conservative 70 percent of that junk's calories are coming from sugar, that's 26.25 teaspoons of added sugar a week or more than 14 pounds of the white stuff a year.
It's never just "one."
Where will we go next?
- "Put on your seatbelt" ... followed by handing the child a piece of licorice.
- "Clean up your room" ... followed by a chocolate bar.
- "Finish your book report"...followed by a bag of chips.
- "Hold my hand while we cross the street"...followed by a jujube.
- "Put on your shoes"...followed by a cookie.
- "Wash your face"...followed by a gumball.
Have we lost all ability to teach our children (I mean a global "our" here, i.e. society's children) to do things because they are healthy, kind, and safe without dangling junk food in front of them? If we have, that's pretty sad. As important as bike helmets are, I think a child stands a better chance of surviving a life without wearing a bike helmet than surviving a lifetime of sugary treats at every turn.
Image credit: jennycu on flickr
Reader Comments (13)
YES! THIS! North Vancouver bylaw officers were handing out "tickets" for ice cream at McDonald's two summers ago - my then 3.5 year old daughter got one and I was pretty annoyed. Since she couldn't read and didn't know the McD logo at the time, I just told her it was an "M" for Megan for wearing her helmet and she was pretty happy. I totally agree that there is candy and juice boxes and sugar at every turn. My daughter's school sports day a couple of weeks ago had the kids play hard all morning, get overstimulated, then get sent home with a huge glazed donut at noon. She ate hers right away (no way I could stop that!) and then had a stomach ache and sugar crash and lay on the couch until 2pm! Ridiculous. Thank you for this post, I bet it will speak to a lot of people. Just wish I knew a solution beyond "not being part of the problem," you know?
Kind of like when I was in elementary school we had "book-it", where if you read a certain number of books (or for a certain number of minutes, I can't remember), you'd get a coupon for a personal pizza from Pizza Hut. On the one hand, I totally agree that using food as a reward is not a good technique overall. On the other hand, if it really is just the one thing (and not organized by the parents), then kids can get really excited about it and maybe do more of whatever it is they're being rewarded for. I'm pretty sure the book-it program encouraged kids to read more if they were reluctant readers, so maybe ice cream will encourage kids to ride their bikes more?
The City of Santa Fe gave me an ice cream cone when I saw 7 years old (1984) because they saw me take off my seat belt as we got out of the car at the local mall. I wore my seat belt every day after that and I never expected another ice cream cone. It was effect then, but that was 20 years ago... maybe time for a different strategy.
Jess -- That is the problem. It is never "just the one thing". It is the constant deluge of things.
Eva: I think part of the solution is having more people speak up. When my kids French teacher suggested using juice and cookies as a reward for the winning team each week in class, one parent spoke up and said that she has struggled with food/weight issues her whole life and is trying to raise her daughter differently. She said that she doesn't want food used as a reward (or taken away as a punishment). The teacher agreed and found another option.
Carla: I never got an ice cream cone for wearing my seat belt. It was just expected of me. The car didn't move if I didn't have it on. I have the same rule with my kids.
Turns out this is happening in Canada too, only this time it is police rewarding children for "good deeds" not for safety issues. http://www.weightymatters.ca/2013/05/ontario-police-reward-children-for-good.html
That is nuts. Ice cream is one thing (unless you're my niece and highly allergic to egg-products) but coupons for McDonalds (or whatever)...I agree, the idea is not a good one.
I grew to adulthood without a bike helmet and rode my bike everywhere (in the Swiss town where I lived at the time, up and down hills and paths, through fields littered with rocks and cow poop)...Despite my being alive and well without having worn the helmets in the 70s both my kids, and I, wear them now on our bikes.
Ice cream, especially the fake kind (dairy dessert, ice cream truck soft style), is not and should not be made an incentive. Too bad we have lost the ability to communicate effectively with our children when enforcing rules, safety or otherwise.
Have you read Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards? It opens up an even better issue than the junk food - the very practice of rewarding "good behavior" can set up huge backfires later.
Ginger Baker:
Yes, I have read Alfie Kohn and generally agree. I think that getting rid of all rewards is a harder sell though, so chose not to focus on that in this post. As it is, the comments on my facebook page show that we have a LONG way to go in convincing people on this one.
I read this this morning and I absolutely agreed 100% with this entire post until the LAST sentence "As important as bike helmets are, I think a child stands a better chance of surviving a life without wearing a bike helmet than surviving a lifetime of sugary treats at every turn. " It takes one head injury to end a life; it takes millions of calories and thousands of bites to become morbidly obese.
I admit this is one of my hottest, hot buttons, irritated by all of the "I never wore a seat-belt/bike-helmet/my parents drove drunk and smoked while pregnant with me/I ate lead paint and lived" bull$hit.
Seat belts, child seats, and other safety improvements became laws for a reason because of very real death tolls that have decreased but not disappeared. I have spent more than four months of my life in neonatal or pediatric intensive care units with my son and I've met parents of a girl who fell off a horse on family vacation, a boy who was hit by a car that was barely moving while skateboarding, and a girl who was in a car accident. Honestly, it's been at least seven years since I met the first one and I'm dubious one of them is still living and the other two are probably either institutionalized or getting in home nursing care. That fast a healthy, "normal" child's life is irrevocably broken and a family's emotional and financial future threatened.
I entirely agree that food is not the best or even right incentive for positive behavior, but this statement is ignorant of and undermines both the prevalence and the severity of traumatic head injury in children and adults and the fact that when it comes to what we put in our mouths, as hard as society makes it, just like a seat belt, a bike helmet, or exercising good sense, it's all ultimately a choice. No one is getting an NG tube shoved down their throat filled with twinkie cream, but some of these children get tube fed for the rest of their lives.
Oh, and I say all of this as a mother of a child who has never had a brain injury, he's had heart surgeries, but spend any amount of time AT ALL in a Children's Hospital and you realize that there is never an empty bed in the ICU, and there are real and permanent impacst on those children and their families. This is something that should never be diminished or devalued. If you want to be the food police, that's fine, I respect and admire you for taking a stand on this important issue of food prevalance, but please refrain from making such a bold and dismissive generalization about something very real that is the number 2 (head injury from falls) cause of accidental death for children under 16, number 1 is auto accidents.
Amanda Rose:
A cycling accident can result in an immediate death or irreversible injury. The consequence of not wearing a helmet just one time has the potential to be severe. The same cannot be said of an ice cream cone, that is true. However, ice cream cones (and other sugary treats) are much, much, much more prevalent than cycling injuries and lead to consequences later in life.
According to the WHO:
"Overweight and obesity are the fifth leading risk for global deaths. At least 2.8 million adults die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. In addition, 44% of the diabetes burden, 23% of the ischaemic heart disease burden and between 7% and 41% of certain cancer burdens are attributable to overweight and obesity." http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/
There is also research that says that obesity is a contributing factor in 100,000 to 400,000 deaths in the United States each year (http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/82/1/207S.full). That is significantly higher than the number of cycling deaths, which falls at around 700 per year (http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/bikeinjuries.html).
I'm not saying that bicycle helmets are not important. I'm just saying that we need to find another way to convince people to wear them. Trading one risk for another (especially one that is already a significant and growing problem) is not the way to go.
This reminds me of how people are taught to train puppies. Keep treats in your pocket at all times and dole them out whenever the dog does what you want or doesn't do what you don't want it to do. This works well with puppies because they are not capable (most of them :) ) of the higher reasoning needed to do something for an internal motivation. I believe that kids are capable of learning internal motivation, and we should assume the best of them!