zlacker

>>rossan+(OP)
This always scared me because I don't even know what counts as shaking.

Can you accidentally shake a baby? Can my 2 year old daughter get shaken baby syndrome when older children on an inflatable castle with her jump and bounce too wild around her (she can't jump yet but loves the bouncing)? I've also often seen parents throw their children a bit in the air and then catch them. The children like it and laugh.

I'm not even speaking of law and police but medically. Can this seriously hurt my daughter?

>>katzen+9e5
A) No, but no one can tell that you’re a dog on the internet. Further, dogs do not dispense reliable medical advice. The op is a press release for a textbook covering this topic in what looks like excruciating detail from a wide variety of angles. I doubt a superior citation exists.

B) Beyond that, my understanding is that once a child is past the infant phase where they cannot support their own head, they’re fine. Humans are not all that delicate. Bumps and falls are inevitable, I don’t see how we would have seen success as a species if the risk were outsized. And I guess we’ve been around for a while by now.

C) TFA does mention this a little but it is split across a wide gap and is not the focus. I pulled the two quotes I think are relevant below.

> And yet, although subdural and retinal hemorrhage may be caused by non-accidental trauma, especially when impact is involved, they simply are not specific for it: indeed, it has been demonstrated that a wide range of accidental events and medical conditions are plausible alternative causes. Particularly fragile infants may sustain severe head injuries following minor household falls. Others may suffer from genetic conditions, metabolic disorders, blood clotting abnormalities, or infections.

> On the other hand, there exist dozens of documented cases of witness reports of shaking, videotaped shakings, and spontaneous admissions of shaking, but without subdural and retinal hemorrhage. In fact, there is virtually no known case of a reliably-documented event of violent shaking without impact of a healthy baby resulting in isolated subdural and retinal hemorrhage (additional markers of trauma would be expected in such cases). In contrast, there have been numerous cases of videotaped or witnessed short falls resulting in these very medical findings, considered “impossible” by the shaking hypothesis.

So it’s like they say: it’s not the fall that gets you, it’s when you land.