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

On 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 him 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 probably a happy medium here. If you do make the choice to use the harness, come up with some parameters — maybe you’ll use it when there is a safety concern, and let him run and explore when there isn’t (you’re not near cars, for example).