You Don’t Sue Just Because Your Kid Hurts Himself On A Playground

29 May, 2003 by John Hawkins

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You Don’t Sue Just Because Your Kid Hurts Himself On A Playground: This sort of lawsuit is a ridiculous waste of time and money…

“The mother of a 9-year-old boy injured when he accidentally hung himself on playground equipment at an East Palo Alto elementary school last year is suing the Ravenswood City School District for damages.

In the suit filed Tuesday, East Palo Alto resident Dorothy McGee said school officials were negligent when her son, Deshawn Watson, accidentally got tangled in a jump rope hanging from playground equipment at Green Oaks Academy, which is also named in the lawsuit.

…”These kids need to be watched at the school,” McGee said. “When people send their kids to school, they expect them to be watched.”

The suit says the day before, Watson and his friends were seen swinging from the “monkey bars” with a jump rope, and school officials did nothing. The playground supervisors, the suit said, should have known that this act could injure children.

McGee’s suit claims the boy suffered “permanent and severe physical, mental, and emotional injuries that have caused him to suffer in academics and his social and private life. and will affect his professional life in the future.

…While Watson’s general health is fine now, McGee said her son hasn’t been doing well mentally since the accident. He used to be a good student and now his grades are poor, she said.

“He’s a changed boy,” she said.”

I can tell you from personal experience that children can & do hurt themselves in all sorts of unusual ways. When I was 7, I broke my leg and spent weeks in traction after making a tackle in a Boy’s Club football game. When I was just a little older, I was in a open field with another kid and we were going hit some golf balls. Not knowing any better, I stood directly behind him — too close behind him — and he split my forehead wide open with his backswing. If my haircut is short enough you may be able to see the faint scar if I can ever get on O’Reilly’s show. Then in my early teens, I somehow managed to impale my leg on the round, dull, knob of a chain link fence that looked about like this as I was trying to crawl over it to get a basketball. I was literally HANGING on this fence with my leg ripped open for a while and I remember telling my uncle that the inside of leg looked like macaroni as he was taking me to the hospital.

Now given all that, I can understand how this kid somehow or another managed to nearly hang himself on the monkey bars. That’s just the sort of thing that can happen to kids (although fortunately not too often). There’s no reason for any responsible adult to go, “Oh no, that kid is playing on the monkey bars with a jump rope, he might hang himself!!” If as a society, we flipped out and awarded money to people every time some kid gets hurt playing outside, we’d have to shut down every playground, gymnasium, and organized athletics league in the country. That’s why suits like this one should be thrown out of court…