Riding With Young Kids as the Only Adult

Filed in archive ATV , ATV Safety , Learning , Motorcycle , Off-Road on May 8, 2007

You've heard it before: Never ride an ATV alone. Never let your kids ride ATVs alone. It's a pretty standard safety practice. You riding an ATV alone is optional and a matter of common sense. With kids, it's the law. They have to be supervised when riding an ATV.

For me, that usually means I'm riding with them, or they're riding in the yard with me outside watching them. It can also be the kids riding in the immediate area of our camp if we're away from home. The point is that you don't let them ride out of your view or out of your control.

As my oldest son gets better at riding his quad, we go further from camp. At 4 years old, we typically don't go much further than you could easily walk back, or get towed back as the case may be. So far, that has been less than a mile.

On one of those relatively short trips, my son and I rode our quads away from camp to a track that was less than ½ mile away. After a few trips around the track, I decided to go off the track and ride around the outside while my son stayed on the track.

In doing so, I went over a berm that led into the wash. Because I wasn't sure what was on the other side of the berm, I was slowing down more as I got closer. By the time I realized there was a cliff at the bottom, my front tires were going over it, and I was almost at a stop, but too fast to keep from going over. It was too late to accelerate and jump down it. Had I known it was there I could have easily made it down by jumping, but as it were, I ended up riding right down the face of the short cliff, about 4 feet high.

In my attempt to stay on the quad, I ended up coming off the seat and pegs, looking at the front of the quad while upside down and still holding on to the bars. I never really crashed or fell off the quad because I held on and got back on the seat... but not before I trashed both wrists, my left thumb, my right Shin and my chest.

I'm sure my son would have been able to get back to camp from where we were if I had really crashed hard and needed help, but if we were on a longer ride, with just the 2 of us, it could have presented a real challenge.

Just something to consider when you ride with youngsters. Make sure they know how to go for help, just in case.