Many of us haven't been in each other's homes for a while now, but pretty soon we'll be getting together inside again. And our children will be heading inside, in their friends' houses.
People store guns inside.
Are you
certain that nobody owns a gun in any of the places your child plays?
If they do own a gun, are you
certain they store it safely?
If not, you need to ask.
That's one issue we discuss in this interview with Dr. Nina Agrawal, a board-certified pediatrician who has expertise in violence against children. She co-founded the Gun Safety Committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics in New York State, and is leading the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force for the American Medical Women’s Association.
Another issue is the gun violence that is primarily faced by children of color, which turns out to affect a far greater number of children.
And how is this all linked to the Peloton recall? You'll have to listen in to find out...
Jump to highlights here:
- (01:00) Indoor playdates are ramping up...will your child be safe?
- (02:29) Introducing Dr. Nina Agrawal, pediatrician and co-founder of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Gun Safety Committee in New York State
- (02:58) Understanding how big is the scope of gun violence against children
- (06:15) The Dickey Amendment: Explaining the massive lack of data and research on gun violence and safety
- (11:24) The ways that gun violence affects children that we might not expect
- (12:32) “I get woken up at night to the sound of gunshots.”
- (17:09) The racial disparity in how children are affected by gun violence
- (20:46) More people purchased guns in 2020, and there are more first-time owners too
- (23:39) The statistical likelihood of children coming to harm if they live with a firearm in their household
- (27:00) Just telling kids not to touch guns doesn't work (even if you think of your child as one who is 'sensible,' and you've talked with them about gun safety)
- (30:45) The Asking Saves Kids Campaign helps to keep kids safer
- (33:06) The surprising link between children involved in gun violence and the Peloton treadmill recall
- (36:07) In American culture, banning all guns can't be the answer
- (40:52) Effective Child Access Laws
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00:02
Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast.
00:06
We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You & What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.
01:00
Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. And today we're going to discuss a topic that I think is about to come into parents' consciousness in a way that it really hasn't as much over the last year. And for some of us, that's a result of our privilege. And I was reflecting that as vaccinations for children become more available, we're probably going to start moving towards indoor play dates without parents being around because when my daughter went into when we went into sort of lockdown, she was young enough that she wasn't really doing playdates indoors with other people in anyone else's houses. And so I never really felt as though I needed to ask, "Are there guns in your house?" because I was always there to supervise. And so of course, over the last year, she's played with a lot of kids on our street, and they're always outside and I can always hear them. And so the danger doesn't seem to be there in the same way for me in those outdoor playdates scenarios. But of course, as vaccinations become available, and these things start to move inside, I don't know which of my friends has guns in their houses. And if I'm kind of uncomfortable asking about this, I'm guessing that a lot of parents haven't even thought about it and don't have it on their collective radar yet. So I wanted to bring that up into our consciousness before we actually need it. And then, of course, there's another issue here as well, that we're going to delve into fairly deeply today, which is that gun violence is becoming increasingly common in a wide variety of settings that children live in and are exposed to, and that this can have really big impacts on them. And that that isn't necessarily talked about or studied nearly as much.
02:29
And we have a very special guest here with us today to talk about these issues. Dr. Nina Agrawal. She's a pediatrician who is board certified in Child Abuse Pediatrics, and she has expertise in Violence Against Children. She was on the faculty at Columbia University in Child and Adolescent Health. She co-founded the Gun Safety Committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics in New York State, and she's leading the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force for the American Women's Association. Welcome Dr. Agrawal.
02:56
Thank you so much for having me, Jen.
02:58
All right. So I wonder if we can maybe start by just understanding how big is the scope of this problem, and piggybacking on that, how much do we know about how big is the scope of this problem, and why don't we know as much as we might want to know?
03:12
Right, great question. Right now, guns are the leading cause of death in children 1 to 19 years of age. Before it was motor vehicle accidents.
03:22
Yeah.
03:23
Now it's firearm. So it's something that's a health issue. It's a public health issue. It's a safety issue affecting all children.
03:34
Okay. And yeah, I actually hadn't seen those latest statistics, the peer reviewed papers I was looking at from 2018 still showed it in that number two position, so. So that's an unfortunate development over the last couple of years that that position has switched then. And it doesn't affect everybody equally, right? It affects some children more than others.
03:53
Yes, definitely. Racially, it affects Black children disproportionately. Blacks, and then Hispanics, and then White children.
04:00
Okay. And I noticed that actually, the way that this data is collected, we might think, Oh, it's fairly easy to understand how prevalent this kind of thing is, how prevalent injuries are. And actually, there's a couple of different ways of estimating it. But the most common way is using data from the Centers for Disease Control, which is sampled from 100 hospitals. And I'm just thinking, Okay, there are 1000s of trauma centers that are dealing with this kind of thing. Can a sample of 100 hospitals give us a complete picture of what the actual prevalence rates for this are?
04:34
Right? Yeah, as with a lot of injuries in children, it's a combination of hospital data and mass data and media. We're increasingly using media data. There's a gun violence archive that looks at shootings in communities, and then the CDC data. I think one of the problems with the CDC data is that it doesn't include non fatal injuries and only includes fatal injuries. So we're missing a lot of children who suffered non fatal injuries and understanding those so that we can prevent them.
05:09
Yeah. Okay. And I think when a lot of parents think about guns, one thing that they may be most kind of afraid of the immediate fear is of a mass shooting. Because there's get so much publicity, right? Is that the thing that we should be the most afraid of statistically speaking?
05:25
Statistically, definitely not. It's 1% of shootings. So much more common is homicide, and suicide, and unintentional injuries. And then mass shootings are a small percentage, but they gain the most immediate attention. And because again, the most immediate attention, they gain the most resources - prevention resources. And so we have children dying every day from homicide and suicide and yet, we're really not devoting the investing in prevention of deaths in those children due to firearms.
06:00
Yeah, okay. And I think a big reason why we're not investing as much in the pieces of this that really matter are that we don't understand it well enough. And there's a reason we don't understand much about gun violence, right? Can you tell us about that reason.
06:15
I love telling the story. It's a story that's not known and once people...
