Will Using a Safety Harness Mess Up My Child?

I have two children, am a special education teacher, and generally consider myself to be a well-informed adult. My parenting style tends to be middle-of-the-road — I let my kids try and succeed (or fall) rather than hover. But my second child — at just over 2 — is a runner. As in, he loves to bolt after a squirrel, a bird, an ice cream truck, with no regard for anyone calling his name. We try to teach him to hold hands, look both ways, and not step into the street through modeling and practice, but he is at that golden age when he can move his body crazy-fast and doesn’t quite understand the safety implications of the street. After a number of close calls, I have considered getting him a harness for when strollers are impractical (we live in a busy urban area) and cars are everywhere. While I know this will earn me judgy looks from other adults, I’m interested in knowing whether they are safe (physically and emotionally), and also whether using them would somehow decrease or stunt my child’s ability to learn traffic safety in a timely manner.

—Scared Mom

There is no good, concrete data here. Leashes are a hot topic in parenting circles but not in academic circles, which I actually think is telling. If this were something that had the potential to somehow really mess up your child, some academic would have started to study it. In practice, the only paper I found on it was about techniques that parents with limited sight use to keep their children safe. There was no discussion of emotional issues.

In the absence of data, I think you can apply some logic here, and some preferences.

On the one hand: a leash will keep your child from running into the street, which is clearly good for safety. Exactly how large the positive safety benefit is, it’s difficult to say. The chance of your child actually running into the street and being hurt is small. Still, it’s not zero, and if you’ve got them on a leash, it’s lower.

On the other hand, there is the concern that your child will more slowly learn about traffic safety as a result. This also does not seem like a trivial concern, but it has to be weighed against the safety issues. Children do need to explore, and if you intended to use a leash all the time so they didn’t, say, climb up the slide at the playground, this would seem problematic.

There is assuredly a happy medium here. Use the harness sometimes, when there is a safety concern. And let him run and explore when the dangers are not from cars.