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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+(OP)
To protect against all possible harm against your child, perhaps consider wrapping them in a giant balloon so they are isolated from all possible outside influences.

We either accept the randomness of fate or we live in self-made prisons.

>>katzen+(OP)
Generally throwing kids around (within reason) is absolutely safe, specially at +2yrs. Rough play is very much part of development for all mammals including us.

Perhaps something to help you cope with this is that our brain although fragile has a lot of redundancy around it.

On a fall or bounce our neck will decelerate our fall/bounce, there is no need to be an athlete, our muscles have a contraction reflex if they are violently streched (myotatic reflex), less so for very young babies with weak neck muscles (think less than 6/9 months).

Then our skull is filled with fluid which has inertia so the force on the skull is not directly transmitted to the brain. You have to slush the liquid around quite a bit before your brain experiences any meaningful force.

Effectively it is only with some extreme force or internal bleeding compressing the brain that brain damage would occur.

>>katzen+(OP)
I don't think you should worry too much. Abusive shaking really involves extreme forces. "Routine shaking" occurring during play is not expected to be harmful to healthy children. Games should be adapted to the age of children according to common sense.

The takeaway of biomechanics studies is basically that you should be much more careful about accidental head impacts on hard surfaces.

>>katzen+(OP)
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.

>>katzen+(OP)
The article as I interpreted says that there is no recorded case where you can get shaken baby syndrome and the sharking was recorded on tape or declared in front of the police, that being said, if your child has some pathology, they might be at risk with even a minor fall

>>Fire-D+nh
You misread the article. The article states that there aren’t any SBS cases with only “isolated subdural and retinal hemorrhage.”

>>DoingI+D8
My kids love it when they come running toward me and I pick them up and in one swoop throw them on to my (big) bed. I'm always holding back because I see their head snap back to land on the mattress, it's that "violent" head-moving-back thing that gives me the fear, so I stopped.

>>CMCDra+g2
I don't think this person is asking to protect against all possible harm. I find it strange that you seem to think it is unreasonable to not want your baby shaken so hard they die, and to want to clearly know how much force that is.

>>katzen+(OP)
re: the bouncy houses and such. Other than kids banging into each other, this never seemed like much of a head or brain injury risk. But watch out for knees! Trampolines with more than one person on them are incredibly dangerous, and bouncy houses seem likely to be pretty dangerous with occupants of widely varying sizes. The specific issue is that the floor may move abruptly and unexpectedly when someone is trying to land, causing a potentially severe knee injury.

If you’re in a bouncy house with kids, consider avoiding any bouncing yourself.

>>stef25+Tk
a core part of my son and i's relationship is me yeeting him on soft pieces of furniture (he's 3)! He is very physical and likes to roughhouse - he injuries himself a lot! Little kids really are made of rubber

>>katzen+(OP)
It is pretty hard for such injuries to occur with the level of movement you're taking about, especially with a child old enough to support their own head. I don't think you need to worry.