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Wellness Wednesday for April 10, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I've towed children in a trailer like that with no helmet but for a total of 30min and perhaps half a dozen times.

If this is a routine transit then it's not a bad idea to optimize safety, and have the kids get used to it/get over it. If it's once every couple weeks, probably not worth the hassle of the helmet.

I expect a helmet to be required only in the case of a collision, as you're probably not going fast enough to do any damage if you had a sudden stop.

If you expect a small chance of a collision on that route it'd probably be wiser to forego the whole endeavor altogether as I don't think these trailers are really designed to take any kind of collision with a much larger vehicle. Or if this is already optimal transportation for you, make peace with the idea that perhaps the kids will get hurt if something bad happens. If having a helmet makes them upset and distracts you from potential road danger, then foregoing the helmet might be the safer option.

I've never been super comfortable pavement road riding by myself (vastly prefer gravel) so minimize road time as much as possible. I believe the chances of us being hit by a car on these roads is adjacent to zero. I agree that being hit by a car is pretty much game over regardless of roll cage etc.

I can see the helmet coming into play if I've forgotten to secure the 5-point hardness and there's a flip.

I do like taking them pretty regularly - perhaps 2x a week?

Great thoughts, thank you!

Oh I didn't consider a flip. Yes in that case a helmet would definitely help, even if they are harnessed.

What I think would happen is that we'd first get into a minor flip and perhaps I'd reconsider the whole idea of pulling them for a whole hour. It probably depends on the terrain because with 4 wheels and quite a bit of weight on the back, I don't really see that thing flipping, but I have a very casual experience with it.

Gotcha - FWIW the hour is cumulative (30 minutes there, then we hang out at the playground till they're tired, then we head back).

Getting it to flip would be really difficult in my experience. There's a flex joint that prevents it from doing so if the bike falls down, and I'm not exactly hopping curbs or speeding around corners.